Speed Dating
by TomFoolery
Summary: Bones is lonely – everyone knows it. When Jim signs him up for speed dating at Yorktown, he makes his usual display of grumbling, but curiosity eventually leads him to a charming blonde with a smile almost as brilliant as her mind. They spend a passionate night together but agree to go their separate ways, until she becomes the new head nurse. Things get awkward fast. NOW COMPLETE
1. Eight Minute Date

" _Damn technology_ ," he grumbled, reading the alert that flashed across his screen.

In twenty minutes, Yorktown's databases would go offline for a routine diagnostic. He glanced at the clock – 1745.

 _So much for finishing his evaluation reports for the outgoing personnel by the end of the day._

He rubbed his eyes, rose to his feet, and stretched. His yawn turned into a low, bellowing moan as he felt his ligaments stretch and muscles elongate. _Almost better than sex_.

No, not really. It had just been so long since he'd even talked with a woman outside of work that he could barely remember what sex was like. No one told him Starfleet would be so damn lonely.

He drummed his fingers on the desk and looked around. His shift wasn't complete until 1800, but he decided to leave early. Being the chief medical officer of a ship that no longer existed was pretty boring work.

Sure, it had been nice at first. He and the rest of his staff started working shifts in Yorktown's medical facilities, taking advantage of the downtime to focus on continuing medical education and independent research. It was great in theory, but most people were too busy fighting to pick up the pieces of their lives.

They'd lost 109 members of their crew during the Swarm's boarding of the _Enterprise_ and their subsequent marooning on Altamid. Everyone had lost someone. Whole departments had been decimated. He counted himself fortunate that he'd only lost three of his forty-eight assigned medical personnel. Engineering hadn't been so lucky.

He'd seen a noticeable uptick in the crew's psychological issues, mostly things like post traumatic stress and survivor's guilt. Medical technology had come a long way in healing every physical injury imaginable, but _emotional_ injuries, those were a different beast. Everyone walked away with scars from Altamid; many just carried them on the inside.

More than two dozen of the crew were quitting, either requesting a transfer or resigning their commissions altogether. The _Enterprise-A_ was getting 137 new crewmembers and officers, but more than half of the positions remained unfilled. He was still short an assistant physician, a head nurse, and two lab techs and he knew Scotty was losing his mind with no warp field engineers.

 _Damn Starfleet personnel resources taking their sweet time._

It was like they didn't realize he had to personally review the medical files of all incoming personnel. They would probably get assigned at the eleventh hour, leaving everyone to scramble. It was just the Starfleet way – hurry up, wait, and then panic at the last minute.

If he were being honest with himself, he wouldn't mind just a little bit of stress right now, and ready or not, he wouldn't be a CMO without an active assignment for much longer. The _Enterprise-A_ was less than seventy-two hours from getting underway, and though space was nothing but a dark hole waiting to suckle on the souls of innocents, he was itching to do something different.

He reached for his communicator and was in the process of tucking his chair under his desk when a familiar face popped around the corner of his semi-private office.

"How you doing, Bones?" Jim asked, stopping to brace himself in the doorway.

"Oh, another day for the record books," he sighed.

"Anything interesting?" Jim asked, his tone suspiciously casual.

"I spent an hour this morning trimmin' the bunions off the feet of a little old lady at the walk-in clinic," he smirked. "Most interesting thing I've done all week."

"Sure, I can see that," Jim chuckled, giving a sage nod.

His computer dinged, alerting him to a new message. _It could wait until tomorrow._

"You should check your messages," Jim mused, glancing at the terminal behind him. "Could be important."

He scowled and traced his finger across the screen to his inbox.

One new message – an invitation to something called "Eight Minute Date."

" _Speed dating_?" he growled, glaring at his friend.

"We're heading back into space in two days and I thought maybe you'd like the chance to-"

" _Throttle you_?" Bones howled.

"Have an open mind!" Jim insisted.

"The only thing I need to have is a drink."

"It's an open bar," Jim added, a crooked smile streaking across his face.

"Yeah, it would _have_ to be."

"I'm going to level with you, Bones – all you do is hide in this office and when you're not here, you're in your quarters. I'm worried about you."

This confession stunned him. So maybe he'd kept to himself lately, so what? Everyone had highs and lows.

"Then come have a drink with me," he offered. "We'll go down to that pool hall on the lower plaza and-"

"I'm on my way to a meeting with Commodore Paris," he shrugged. "And she _does_ like to talk."

"Well, good luck with that," Bones said, powering down his computer terminal.

"Well, this eight minute date thing-"

"Maybe some other time, Jim," he said, slapping the captain on the shoulder as he walked past him. "And by some other time, I mean never."

"What's it gonna take, Bones?"

They strolled together, walking in step down the long arm toward the plaza. Jim was nearly trotting to match his pace, shooting a series of probing looks at him as they marched.

"We're leaving in less than three days," he argued. "What's the point of meeting someone I'm never going to see again?"

"It's called _speed dating_ ," Jim sneered. "I don't think anyone imagines you're going to meet the love of your life. You just need to get out of your quarters for a night. Once we're back on _Enterprise_ , it's going to be _work work work_ all the time."

"Haven't you ever heard the expression you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink?"

"More Georgia wisdom," Jim groaned.

"Look, I appreciate what you're tryin' to do, and maybe you're right: I should put myself out there more. But no speed dating."

"Yeah, ok then," Jim agreed, stopping in front of the headquarters building. "I'll catch up with you tomorrow."

When he rolled into his quarters several minutes later, he was greeted by random piles of dirty clothes and a handful of empty liquor bottles lining the small counter like sentries. His sickbay was never anything short of immaculate, but he was less particular when it came to the nest of Leonard McCoy.

He kicked off his shoes as he walked to the kitchen.

" _Damn_."

There wasn't enough bourbon left in the bottom of the square glass bottle to get a fly buzzed, and of course he'd run out of Scotch two days ago.

It hadn't occurred to him just how much he'd been drinking lately. Drinking alone was for assholes and the broken-hearted.

He sat down on his couch and ran his hands through his hair, gently massaging his temples. No one had told him Starfleet would be so lonely, but it was just as lonely on the other side.

Joanna would turn fourteen in a couple of weeks. He'd invited her to visit him at Yorktown, but the ex-wife had refused, citing a trip to the frontier of space as "too dangerous." Life was dangerous. His daughter hadn't really seemed excited about coming anyway – she had her own life, her school, and her friends. They were fast becoming strangers, and that killed him.

He slumped back against the couch and stared at the ceiling. He was alone, out of booze, and not the least bit tired.

"I could go just to check it out," he said, scratching his chin. "I wouldn't have to _stay_ or anything."

 _Great, now he was talking to himself._

That settled it. He stripped off his uniform and hopped in the sonic shower, enjoying the sensation of the pulse vibrations on his muscles. He paused to examine his naked body in the floor length mirror on the back of the lavatory door. He pinched his midsection and grimaced – he'd put on a kilo or three in his sedentary lifestyle aboard the starbase.

He traced his fingertips along his jaw to measure the length of the stubble. He always thought he looked better with a few days' growth, but he'd shaved that morning and the five o'clock shadow that had grown in just made his face look dirty.

He shaved and brushed his teeth, donned a set of gray slacks and a light blue dress shirt, and returned to the bathroom to judge the result. He untucked the shirt and undid the top button: casual but still nice. He combed his hair back, then forward, made an attempt to part it, and then just decided to let it do its thing.

As he set down the comb, he spied a gray hair at his hairline and viciously yanked. _Damn things_.

At thirty-six years old, he was closer to forty than thirty. If he had asked himself ten years ago where he thought he would be today, he would have said something like "living in the country with my wife and a few kids, playing basketball on the weekends and running a thriving medical practice." That had always been the plan. Yet here he was, huddled over a sink in a tiny bathroom at the fringes of explored space, _alone_ , preening for _speed dating_ , the most desperate mating ritual ever devised by humanity.

He started to browse for more gray hairs and then abandoned the search. So what if he had a few grays? At least his hair was all _there_.

When he walked into the ballroom on the upper plaza, he found a diverse group of people milling around and a cheerful woman with blue hair and a bowtie waving at him.

"Over here to register," she called.

He slouched in front of her table and took a questionnaire. As he began to provide data about what he was looking for in a prospective partner, he suspected he'd bitten off more than he could chew.

The questions got more embarrassing and painful, and by the time he arrived at, "Would you be open to dating someone who engages in violent mating rituals?" he asked the woman, "What exactly do you plan to do with this information?"

"Oh, just fill out as much as you feel comfortable," she grinned.

He scowled and handed the PADD back to her, and she gave him a small device. As she input his data into the computer, he received a table assignment.

"Ok, so you're going to start at table 13, and when you hear the timer go off, you'll move to your right, to table 14," she cooed. "Now here's a PADD with a list of rules and a place to write some notes, and I wish you the best of luck. We're going to get started here in a few minutes, so when you hear the timer-"

"I think I've got it," he sighed, forging the most polite smile he could muster.

He made his way to the bar to collect a whiskey neat and enjoyed a long, slow sip of the burning liquid. He looked around, noting that more than half the people in the room were human, but there were several species he couldn't even identify. He had a pretty open mind, but he thought back to the questionnaire and hoped none of the alien women in the room killed after mating.

The buzzer sounded sooner than he anticipated, and he trudged to table thirteen. The woman was facing away from him, but he could already tell she was about ten years his senior.

" _Have an open mind_ ," he muttered through clenched teeth.

He sat down and she introduced herself as Amelia. She had a kind face and wry smile, but the slight odor of metabolizers suggested she was actually much older than he'd supposed. Modern medicine had come a long way in helping people age more gracefully, and in his professional, medical opinion, Amelia was slurping from the fountain of youth like a camel at an oasis.

Best guess, she was about seventy.

 _But so what?_ He wasn't here to meet the love of his life or have a careless fling. He could sit and have some polite conversation.

"So what do _you_ do, Leonard?" she clucked.

"I'm a physician."

" _Ooooooohhhhh_ , a doctor!" she sighed, a dreamy look spreading over her face. "Maybe you could take a look at this mole."

She shrugged her shirt off her left shoulder and tried turning around for him to examine a spot on her back.

"I really- um- hasn't your own doctor looked at it?"

"He's an idiot," she barked.

Leonard actually thought the man must be a genius if he had Amelia looking closer to fifty than seventy. He took a long draught of his whiskey and shrugged.

"I have another mole you might be interesting in… _checking out_ ," she grinned, leaning over the table.

He threw back the last of the liquor and set the tumbler glass on the hard table with an audible clink. He waved his hand at the server at the other end of the room.

Not that it mattered much. _There wasn't enough alcohol in the quadrant._


	2. The Long Wait

" _Stupid dreams_ ," she moaned, looking around the dark room with unfocused eyes. "Computer, what time is it?"

" _The time is 0522_ ," the computer droned.

She didn't have enough time to go back to sleep, but she wasn't ready to get up for the day either. She flopped back down in the bed and allowed her eyes to drift closed. She used to have nightmares every time she dozed off, but the therapy, medication, and maybe time had been helping. Still, she thought of the _Constellation_ – what was left of it, anyway – and the hundreds of friends and coworkers she'd lost more than she wanted to admit.

It had been more than two months since that fateful day in the L-374 system. They'd been investigating several destroyed star systems when Commander Masada spotted the unusual anomaly. Upon closer look, that anomaly turned out to be a centuries old berserker weapon, cheerfully slicing through a planet with an antiproton beam as if it were nothing more than soft cheese.

The _Constellation_ 's deflector shields never stood a chance. Captain Decker managed to outmaneuver and destroy the deadly automated weapon, but it came at such an enormous cost.

Christine was down in engineering for most of the battle – a stroke of luck that would spare her life. The first burst of weapons fire knocked out transporters, so medical teams had been dispatched all over the ship to treat mass casualties. She'd turned an engineering storage locker into a makeshift trauma ward and was treating a crewman with severe plasma burns when the lights went out.

The ship's automatic safety protocols sealed off the storage locker, trapping them inside with no power and no communications with the rest of the ship. It was terrifying in the dark void, feeling the ship shudder as it was being torn apart, but she didn't have time to think about it with the screams of the wounded coming at her from all directions. She powered on the flashlight on her communicator, tied it to her forehead with engineering tape, and returned to treating the injured.

When they managed to pry their way out of the storage locker two days later, they found death and destruction at every turn. The bridge had depressurized, leaving the entire command team dead. Sickbay was _gone_ – just a black, charred hole on the port side of Deck 5. Aside from the personnel that had been trapped in engineering storage locker 3, there were no survivors. Out of a crew of 430, 14 remained.

That left her, Lieutenant Christine Chapel, a nurse with zero command experience, as acting captain by virtue of rank. The others looked to her for guidance and she did her best, putting on the bravest face she could muster and leaning on the collective experience of the survivors.

Subspace interference from the planetary and astral debris made communication impossible. Life support was failing and the ship's engines were dead, but no one knew how to pilot a starship anyway. It took nearly a month of studying, troubleshooting, jury-rigging, and sheer ingenuity, but together they managed to restore limited life support and limp out of the debris field at half impulse.

Another two days and they managed to send a distress call, and two days after _that_ , salvation came in the form of the _USS Lexington_. The _Lexington_ had taken the survivors on board, treated them for radiation sickness and exhaustion, and towed the remains of the _Constellation_ back to Yorktown for investigation and salvage.

And now here she was three weeks later, emotional scars still red and raw, wondering why _she_ of all people got to survive when so few others had.

Life at Yorktown was becoming a monotonous blur. Her days were full of meetings with senior staff officers and appointments with the psychiatrist. In between those, she endured filing reports, dodging reporters, and finding a way to make herself feel something again. The rest of the _Constellation_ 's crew had already left for new assignments; she couldn't recall a time in her life when she'd been so alone.

Yorktown was an incredible place. It was something of a crossroads, teeming with a diversity of life and culture than could only be possible on a twenty-eight kilometer long artificial habitat on the frontier of space. She wanted to get out and explore its offerings, but she also didn't want to get too attached. There was just no way to know where her next assignment would take her.

She pushed her legs out of bed, stood, and bellowed a forceful yawn as she stretched. She had a meeting with Commander Zograf, the director of Starfleet Personnel Resources at Yorktown, at 0700 and she didn't intend to be late. Maybe today would be the day she would get an assignment and finally feel like she could move on with her life. The psychiatrist said she was ready, and she felt ready too.

She took her time with her morning rituals, enjoying the sensation of the sonic shower, the roll of the hairbrush on her scalp, the tickle of the toothbrush on her tongue. She donned her blue uniform dress and work boots, pinned her blonde hair into a bun, and almost smiled at the result in the lavatory mirror. She certainly _looked_ the part of Starfleet Lieutenant Christine Chapel.

When she strolled into Zograf's office at 0655, she almost _felt_ like Lieutenant Christine Chapel, noting the weight of terms like "survivor" and "victim" had faded more than she'd realized.

"Ah, Christine," he grinned. "Please have a seat."

The muscles in her face twitched at his informal use of her first name. Her _friends_ called her Christine, and a lot of them were dead. She didn't even know _Zograf's_ first name – the message had abbreviated his name to the initials T.J. – so it seemed strange he would chat her up like they were old pals at a bar having drinks.

"Feel good to be safe again?" he asked.

" _Safe_? Again?"

"Being on Yorktown," he explained, pivoting in his chair to wave at the long window behind him that overlooked the upper plaza decks.

"Is there such a thing as _safe_?" she mused. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't some kind of drone army plow through this starbase a few months ago?"

"The Swarm, yeah," he laughed. "Fair point."

"It's not really funny," she snapped.

He arched his brow and reeled in his seat, uttering a low whistle. The words hung thick in the air and she teetered on the edge of uncertainty. Should she immediately apologize or wait for _him_ to? What kind of person acted so nonchalantly about an attack that resulted in hundreds of casualties? And yet, what kind of person disrespected the man who held her career in his hands?

"I've been here for three weeks," she finally added. "But I don't know that I feel completely safe, or ever will again."

"Look, I know you've been through a lot, Christine-"

"Lieutenant Chapel," she corrected. "Or Nurse Chapel."

 _Why did he have to make it so hard for her to be pleasant?_

He opened his mouth to argue but shook his head. "Dr. Green says you're cleared for duty once again-"

"I have been for more than a week," she interrupted.

"Yes, but it's been very hard finding an appropriate assignment for you."

"You're telling me that in all of Starfleet, you can't find a single position for a nurse practitioner?"

"It's about more than just filling an open position."

Here it was – the pitch about career and personal development and the need to balance personnel requests with Starfleet's needs and _blah blah blah_. She'd already listed her preferences. She didn't want to go back out on a starship and she wasn't really interested in a frontier assignment to a starbase either. She'd graduated from the Academy more than five years ago and hadn't spent more than three consecutive days on a planet since. Why couldn't it be _her_ turn for an easy two-year assignment closer to home?

"You specifically requested the Sol system, and I don't think that's right for you at this stage of your career," he began. "If you want to be on the fast track to promotion, you need the deep space assignments."

She watched Zograf, taking care to ensure her face remained neutral while she listened to him tell her how to get promoted. _Zograf_ , a personnel resources officer who had probably spent his entire career bouncing from one cushy planetary assignment to the next, a man who probably thought Yorktown was "roughing it," he apparently thought she needed to put on her game face and get back to the lonely darkness of space for the "good of the Federation."

"So what _is_ available?" she sighed.

"I'd really like to put you in a chief nurse position," he replied, cracking a smile across his smug face. "There are a number of options – the _Saratoga_ was recently commissioned, the _Enterprise-A_ is days away from commissioning, Starbase 23 has-"

"Isn't Starbase 23 practically in the Romulan Neutral Zone?"

"Well, it's pretty close, yes."

Her eyes shifted from Zograf to the knick-knacks on his desk. A collection of miniature bobble heads of famous Starfleet leaders stood in a neat little formation at the edge. A chief nurse position certainly _would_ look good on her resume, but all she wanted was a break.

"Two years," Zograf said. "Do two more years in deep space, and I'll put you in for a guaranteed follow on assignment to Earth."

"Sure," she said, struggling to get her lips to turn out of the sneer they were attempting to form.

"I'm glad you agree," he grinned, turning back to his computer. "I do have a short list of assignments I think would be excellent for you. I already mentioned the _Saratoga_ -"

"It doesn't matter," she interjected. "I'll go wherever I'm needed."

It really _didn't_ matter as far as she was concerned. A posting to the Romulan border, the Klingon border, or a patrol ship that cruised along their border with the Cardassian Union – they were all equally depressing prospects.

She wasn't sure how adept she was at hiding her disappointment as she stood to leave. He told her that her assignment orders would be posted no later than tomorrow afternoon and to continually check her messages, and she thanked him, despite hating him for being a pompous man-child in a uniform who casually made important life decisions for other people as if it were no big deal.

She spent the rest of her morning preparing to outprocess Yorktown. She had lost everything on the _Constellation_ and though she had been issued a set of basic uniforms when she arrived at the starbase, she still needed to get basic issue items and hospital scrubs from the issuance facility.

She spent the early afternoon sorting and packing her new equipment, took a short break for lunch, and went by the office of the personnel clerk and the medical clinic to outprocess their offices. On her way back to her quarters, she passed a boutique with a row of mannequins sporting beautiful clothes.

She stopped to window shop, smiling at the vibrant colors and remembering lie in her late teens when she'd get dressed up and go out for a night on the town.

 _How she wanted to feel pretty again._

" _Ugh, that sounds so vain_ ," she thought, feeling guilty for longing for such petty things after everything that had happened.

Then she saw the billowy dress with the white top and the cerulean blue skirt and caught herself thinking just how nice it would look with her eyes. She stepped inside and pulled the dress from the rack, holding it up to her body in front of a long mirror, one no doubt designed more for flattery than truth.

Then she thought of Zograf and the fact in just a few days she would be bound for the far reaches of the black hell known deep space, and decided she didn't care how impractical such a garment would be hanging up in her closet of the _USS Lonely and Depressing_ or wherever personnel resources decided to send her.

She bought the dress and a pair of nude heels and resolved that she would actually go out and eat dinner in a nice restaurant, rather than eat from the replicator in her quarters. Maybe the key to feeling normal was just to act normally for long enough that it eventually became habit.

She left the shop and continued onward to her quarters, but stopped a short time later in front of a beauty salon. The few strands of her hair not ravaged by split ends were threatening to mutiny, her cuticles were overgrown, and her nails were cracked and chipped. She used to care a lot about those things, back before she graduated the Academy.

Less than five minutes later, two women went to work on her hair and nails and she allowed herself to enjoy the delicious sensation of the nail buffer and the melodic snipping of the scissors behind her.

"You must have a date tonight," said the woman brushing clear polish over her fingernails.

"Uh, _no_ ," Christine mumbled. "It would be nice, but I'm just passing through Yorktown."

"No boyfriend then?"

"No."

"They're having speed dating tonight in one of the upper plaza ballrooms," quipped the hairdresser. "If you're just looking for a fun way to spend the evening."

" _Speed dating_?"

"Hey, don't judge me," the woman laughed, cutting a row of long layers into her blond locks. "Besides, they have an open bar."

She looked at the dress bag draped over the corner of the chair behind her, thinking it would be shame for such a nice dress to just hang in a closet for years, even if speed dating was _really_ desperate.

When she got back to her quarters and changed out of her blue uniform dress, she examined herself in the lavatory mirror. She was still a bit skinny after spending more than a month on half rations on the _Constellation_ , but the haircut and makeup had gone a long way to restoring something inside herself she hadn't even been aware was broken. By the time she pulled the dress over her head and put on the towering heels, she almost thought she could pass for sexy.

She arrived a bit early to the upper plaza ballroom. A woman with a garish bow tie and royal blue hair flagged her down, handed her a PADD, and asked her to fill out one of the longest questionnaires of her life. She thought she had a good handle on embarrassing questions, being a nurse and all, but the people hosting this event had the market cornered on mortification.

She went to the bar, ordered a glass of wine, and found her way to table 17, which was nestled in an alcove by a window overlooking the plaza. She surveyed the room and noticed a lot of older humans and a fair amount of people from other species, including several she'd never seen before. When the buzzer sounded and the first guy sat down, she felt compelled to take his vitals, given that he looked like he had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.

He was certainly old enough to be her grandfather, and thought he was possibly old enough to pass for her great-grandfather, until he began to rage about Federation politics and recalled the "Golden Age" of President Archer. He was _definitely_ old enough to be her great-grandfather.

"Another glass of wine, miss?"

" _Hmmm_?" She turned to see a waiter offering to refill her wine glass.

"Can you leave the bottle?" she winced.

The next three men who visited her table featured a children's magician who took great delight in pretending to pull various objects from her ears, a swarthy-looking individual who seemed a bit _too_ jumpy when he noticed security patrols on the plaza through the window by her table, and a man who seemed really nice, until she asked him how his day was and he started to cry about his wife leaving him for another man – twelve years ago.

She was halfway through the bottle of wine and feeling quite toasty when the buzzer sounded and Rick, the jilted husband, stumbled on to the next table. She exchanged glances with the woman sitting at table 18, shrugged, and fell into a fit of giggles.

Even if speed dating was turning into a disaster, it felt _so_ good to laugh again.

"Do I really look that funny?" murmured a voice with a heavy southern American accent.

She turned to discover one of the most handsome men in the room, one hand in his pocket and the other holding a glass of whiskey. She could feel the alcohol in her system grinding away at her social filters, but she didn't really care.

"No," she replied with an unusual seductive boldness. "I think you look just right."

He cocked his left eyebrow in a charmingly boyish way and a crooked smile spread across his mouth and soon reached his other features. His dark hair and half tucked dress shirt made him look a bit messy, but it suited him.

"Won't you have a seat?" she said, returning his smile.

"Yes ma'am," he drawled.

Anyone else calling her "ma'am" would have gotten a death stare, but somehow old-fashioned charms suited him also.

"I'm Christine," she said, taking a sip of her wine before extending her right hand across the table.

"Leonard," he replied, polishing off his whiskey and returning her handshake.

She found his hand soft but strong, noting his palm was slightly sweaty and wondering if hers was too. They held the handshake for a second longer than was probably appropriate, and when she met his brown eyes, she caught herself thinking that perhaps speed dating wasn't the worst idea after all.


	3. The Lightning Round

After leaving Amelia, he'd found his way to the table of an excitable woman named Libby whose pale skin was made to look paler by a shock of blue-black hair. Libby's lone hobby was collecting old-fashioned condiment jars and bottles, and Bones had listened patiently for eight minutes while she extolled the virtues of glass over plastic and the best way to restore fading labels. He'd never gotten a word in edgewise.

After Libby was Asil, a Vulcan xenoanthropologist researching the courting rituals of other species. Asil was attractive and fascinating but had made it clear she was not pursuing a romantic encounter. Even if she _had_ been interested in him, there was no way he could have gotten close to her without thinking of Spock every time she opened her mouth. He had an open mind, but not _that_ open, apparently.

Then there was Mrs. Grabowski, the widow whose corns he'd spent all morning removing at the walk-in clinic. Leonard had done most of the talking while she blushed, giggled, and cast bashful glances down at the table.

He was on his fourth glass of whiskey and definitely starting to feel it when he turned the corner into the alcove to locate table 17, where he found a blonde with her head tilted back in an honest laugh. He mistook her eyes for brown at first, but as he took a few more steps he realized they were dark blue. She was more starkly attractive than beautiful, possessing of some underlying vitality that he couldn't quite put a name to.

"Do I really look that funny?" he asked, trying to figure out what to do with his free hand before tucking it in his pocket to look more casual.

She turned her flirtatious, critical eyes toward him and said with an accent that sounded American but from nowhere in particular, "No, I think you look just right."

Something about her approval made him stand a little taller and he felt a dopey grin spread across his face. Sometime between leaving Libby's table and sitting down with Asil, he'd given up on the whole speed dating concept, but he was definitely willing to keep an open mind for _her_.

A genuine smile cracked across her lips and she waved at the chair in front of her. "Won't you have a seat?"

"Yes ma'am," he replied, wondering if he was coming off as a little too eager.

She took a long sip of her wine without taking her eyes off him, paused, and then offered her hand. "I'm Christine."

He threw back the rest of his drink and took her hand. "Leonard."

 _God he hoped his palms weren't sweaty._

She poured herself more wine and pointed to his empty tumbler glass. "Another whiskey?"

 _He liked her more and more._

"Thanks, but I already have an arrangement with the bartender," he replied, wishing he had the power to wipe the stupid smile from his face.

"Interesting," she said, resting her chin on the heel of her palm. "Can I ask you three questions, Leonard?"

"Shoot."

"Are you a magician?"

"Uh, no?"

"Are you a felon?"

"Not that I know of."

"And are you under the age of eighty?"

"Barely," he winked.

"Wonderful," she beamed, sitting up and clapping her hands together. "I think we'll get along famously."

"My turn," he said, resting his forearms on the table to lean closer to her. "Are _you_ under the age of eighty?"

"A lady never tells her age."

"Do you collect condiment bottles?"

"Like mayonnaise? _No_?"

"Are you going to ask me to look at any weird moles or bunions?"

"Is that some kind of kink thing? Are you into that kind of stuff?"

It was his turn to deliver a candid laugh. "No, actually."

"Good," she answered, making a face. "So tell me about _you_ , Leonard."

The waiter delivered a fresh glass of whiskey, but rather than race to pick it up, he leaned forward on his elbows. "What do you want to know?"

"What do you want to tell me?"

"Uh, I'm Leonard. I'm a doctor-"

"Oh no," she interrupted, giving a look of fake shock.

"What?"

"This will never work."

"Why is that?"

"I'm a nurse."

He hesitated before answering, taking stock of the woman on the other side of the table and thinking that if he weren't a doctor, he would probably go out of his way to incur minor injuries just to end up in her clinic and let her work her magic with a bone knitter or dermal regenerator. He pushed the chair away from the table and crossed his arms, deciding to take a gamble.

"Well, if that's how you feel, I'll just go-"

"Sit down, Leonard," she snapped. "You haven't even touched your whiskey."

He picked up the glass and took a sip. "So Christine, what brings you to speed dating?"

"What brings _anyone_ to speed dating?" she quipped, her voice almost singing a sad tune of sincerity.

He raised his glass and said, "To not being bored and drinking ourselves to sleep alone in our quarters."

"Hear hear," she said, returning his toast with her wineglass.

Her eyes darted to the clock on the wall. She cocked her head back in his direction and said, "We only have two minutes left."

"You sure seem to be in a hurry to get rid of me," he joked.

"I'm enjoying you," she rebutted. "You're a breath of fresh Mississippi air."

"Georgia," he corrected. "I grew up in Athens, just east of Atlanta."

" _Really_?" she frowned. " _No_. No, I don't think so."

"I went to medical school in Mississippi."

"Maybe that's it," she sighed, finishing the wine in her glass.

"Well Dr. Leonard from Athens, Georgia, who went to medical school in Mississippi and has a weird fetish about moles and bunions… I don't want to let you go just yet."

"Then _don't_ ," he said, leaning back in his chair. "Let's get out of here."

"And leave all this?" she scoffed, waving her arm around the room.

"Well, I overheard the guy next to me tell a Vulcan anthropologist how he feels like a cat trapped in man's body."

"You did _not_ ," she sneered.

"Are you willing to take that chance?" he said, raising his eyebrows.

"Get me out of here," she giggled, pushing herself back from the table.

She rose from her chair, clutching the table for balance. She stood tall on a pair of shapely legs, made taller still by the beige heels on her feet.

"I think I'm a little drunk," she frowned, clasping her hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle.

Bones' mind felt a little foggy too but he was still sober enough to walk and carry on a conversation. _He hoped_.

The buzzer sounded and she glanced at the door. "Quick, before the next one shows up."

"Yes ma'am," he replied, leaning against the table for her to pass.

"I don't know why, but you sound kind of sexy when you say that," she crooned. "Anyone else and it would be annoying."

" _Thanks_?" he said, following her through the rows of tables.

"Hey!" called a male voice behind him.

Bones turned to see the man he'd falsely accused of believing he was a cat shooting him a dirty look. He smiled and shrugged. He wasn't going to feel guilty about walking out of speed dating with the prettiest woman in the room.

They strolled out onto the upper plaza and Christine locked her arm around his to steady herself. "So where are we going?"

"You hungry?" he asked.

She gave him a thoughtful look, and ten minutes later they were siting down in a booth in a small Italian restaurant on one of the lower decks. He was about to order a beer when Christine asked for water, and thinking it would probably be better to keep a clear head, he did the same.

He slid into an empty booth and asked, "So, where are you from?"

"Cleveland," she replied, pursing her lips and pivoting her elbows on the table.

"So why did you become a nurse?"

"Why did you become a doctor?"

"Do you always answer a question with a question?"

"Do you always smile like that at every woman you talk to?"

He grabbed one of the complimentary breadsticks and took a bite. Nurse Christine definitely had a lot of pluck.

She chuckled and looked down at her hands. "As of last year, I'm actually a nurse practitioner. I became a nurse for the same reason everyone becomes a nurse – I like to help people."

"Then why not be a doctor?"

" _Ugh, here we go_ ," she said with a roll of her eyes. "The argument that nurses are people who couldn't hack it as physicians, as if having an MD after your name is the end all be all of healthcare."

"I didn't say that," he shot back. "You could just as easily ask me why I didn't become a nurse instead of a doctor."

"Fine, why didn't you?"

"Because I have a terrible bedside manner."

She snorted and took a sip of her water. "At least you know your shortcomings."

"So why did you become a nurse?"

"Because I have an _excellent_ bedside manner."

"At least you know your strengths."

She took a breadstick for herself, nipped a bite off one end, pointed it at him and said, "I think I like you, Dr. Leonard with the terrible bedside manner."

And he liked her too: maybe _too_ much for having picked her up at speed dating only half an hour ago.

"I should probably tell you I'm not going to be on Yorktown very much longer," he said, catching her gaze. "I leave in-"

She reached across the table and put a finger over his lips. He could taste the sugary garlic from the breadstick she'd been eating and it reminded him of her – sweet and slightly salty.

"Me either," she added, sitting back in her seat. "I'll be gone… I don't know when. Could be days, could be weeks."

He felt the flicker of a strange emotion, something caught between hope and longing. He had asked Jim what the point of speed dating was if he was going to meet people he would never see again, and what had Jim said? Something like, "No one meets the love of their life at speed dating."

He hadn't even known her for an hour and he would be an idiot to believe she was his soul mate after such a brief encounter, but he had never had this kind of instant connection with a woman before. She was smart in more ways than one and probably out of his league, but she either didn't notice or didn't care.

"Do you want to just have tonight?" she asked.

The waiter came by and dropped off the pizza they'd ordered, but she didn't flinch.

"If that's ok with you," he replied, wondering if he was setting himself up for unnecessary heartache.

"Well, let's eat our pizza and see where it goes," she shrugged, reaching for a large piece and plopping it down on her plate. "It's already promising, by the way."

"What is?"

"Well, I'm getting sober but you're not getting uglier. Quite the opposite, actually."

He scoffed, shook his head, and dug into the pizza. They shared a lively dinner; he couldn't remember the last time he'd had such interesting conversation. As they sobered up she became quite a bit gentler and Leonard found it hard not to ask more personal questions, even though they both agreed to keep things more casual.

They read many of the same medical journals and spent a whole hour dissecting a recent controversial study in the Rigelian Journal of Medicine claiming to have found a chemical stimulant capable of speeding up reproduction and replacement of blood in the body by nearly seventy percent. They discovered they shared a love of horseback riding, disliked replicated food, and had the same aversion to transporters.

They debated the safety of neural stimulators, argued a number of classic medical ethics cases, and fought over whether mountain vacations were superior to beach vacations. They easily agreed that ketchup was a questionable condiment but peanut butter must have been divinely inspired, and he was just in the middle of making a case for bluegrass music when the when the pizzeria's manager finally asked them to leave so he could close the restaurant.

"We knew it wasn't going to last forever," she said, rising from the booth.

He held the door for her on their way out. The traffic on the plaza was light and she looked around hopefully. "Want to walk me back to my quarters?"

He was happy for an excuse to spend a few more minutes with her, but he questioned whether it was a good idea. Despite his better judgment, he replied, "Absolutely."

He followed her to the bay of turbolifts where they rode to deck 22 and wound their way through several narrow passages. One thing immediately stood out – she was taking him to Starfleet officer's quarters.

"Are you in Starfleet?" he asked, wondering how that hadn't come up during their four hour long shared meal.

"Why? Is that a problem?"

"Uh… _no_ ," he said, rubbing the back of his head. "I just-"

" _Argh_!" she yelped.

He managed to reach his arms to out catch her just in time, though he unfortunately grabbed her left breast instead of her arm. She either didn't notice or didn't care, and he quickly saw why: her right stiletto heel had gotten wedged in a ventilation grate in the floor. She pulled her foot out of her shoe and winced as she tried to bear weight on it.

"May I?" he asked, squatting down to examine the joint for deformities while she braced herself on his shoulder.

She hissed through her teeth as his fingers palpated the tendons that crossed her ankle joint.

"Well, I can't do a very thorough exam with you standing up in the hallway, but if you can come to sickbay-"

"My room is right there," she said, pointing over his shoulder to a door twenty meters away. "I have a professional med kit."

He steadied her so she could kick off her other shoe and allowed her to drape her right arm across his shoulders. He picked up her shoes by their pointy heels and together they slowly hobbled to her room.

When they reached her quarters he helped her sit down in the desk chair near the entryway and she pointed him in the direction of the closet for the med kit. He opened the door to find a neat row of hanging uniforms, noting the pips on her dress uniform signifying she was a lieutenant.

"It's on the floor towards the back and to the left," she called.

He located the medical kit and when he turned back to her, he found her holding her hands out expectantly. She snapped her fingers and said, "Give it here."

He scowled and knelt, opening the med kit to extract the tricorder.

"I can do it," she insisted.

"So can I," he barked, suppressing a grin. "Trust me: I'm a doctor."

She shot him a pointed look and crossed her arms. Twenty minutes later he diagnosed her with a severe sprain and gave her a hypo of 10 ccs of terakine before giving her a once over with the tissue regenerator to stimulate healing in her bruised ligaments.

When he was done, she bent to examine the results, teasing, "I just need to make sure you didn't mess anything up."

He could see down the front of her dress and felt his face growing hot.

"Or you could just say, 'thank you Dr. McCoy' and be done with it," he shot back.

"McCoy?"

"Yeah," he mumbled, twisting at the waist to begin reassembling her meticulously maintained medical kit. "You didn't think I was just Leonard with no last name, did you?"

"Leonard McCoy," she said thoughtfully, rolling the words off her tongue.

Personally he thought his name never sounded so good as when it was coming out of her mouth, and he grinned a little to himself. "Most people just call me Bones though."

"Bones? That's morbid. Is that supposed to be some kind of throwback to antiquated hacksaw surgeons?"

"Well," he mused, thinking of that fateful day on the Academy shuttle with Jim following a raw and bitter divorce, "not exactly, but it's not important. Anyway, can you put weight on that ankle now?"

He turned back to her and was about to stand when he was met by the soft, warm press of her lips on his. He didn't hesitate. He traced his tongue along the tip of hers, enjoying the tickle of her fingers as they traced through his messy hair.

Unfortunately his hands got ahead of themselves and found their way to her thighs and began pushing up her dress. She shuddered, snapping him back to reality. It had been so long since he'd been with a woman it was almost like he'd forgotten how not to make a complete ass of himself. "I'm sorry, I didn't-"

"No," she said, biting her lip and reaching for his fingers to slide them back on the inside of her thighs. "You have incredible hands."

"You know, I really don't like to get involved with my patients," he joked, feeling himself getting very quickly worked up.

" _Shut up_ ," she sneered, pulling him into another longer, deeper kiss.

That was all it took. Their movements became more aggressive until she finally pulled his shirt over his head and started working at the buckle of his belt. They stood awkwardly, refusing to break their passionate bout of kissing. They began shuffling toward her bed as he fumbled with the zipper in the back of her dress, and soon they fell into a tangle of hungry passion.

 _So much for not getting too involved._


	4. The Walk of Shame

She sat cross-legged, staring into his rich, brown eyes. She slowly took stock of his body. A touch of pudgy fluff sat on his midsection and his chest was covered in a sparse patch of dark hair. Thankfully she was too drunk to feel shy.

Leonard McCoy was… _new_. He was funny and charming in a way that should have been annoying but wasn't. And then there were his _hands_.

 _She felt almost sad that she would have to let him go._

She took a swig straight from the wine bottle and laughed.

"Your turn," she slurred, passing it to him. "Would you rather… live in a world with no problems or live in a world where you ruled?"

"Darlin', a world _I_ rule has nothin' _but_ problems," he grinned.

She wasn't sure if it was the alcohol in _her_ system or in _his_ , but his accent seemed to be growing thicker.

" _Drink_ ," she smirked, snapping her fingers at him.

He did as she asked and handed back the wine. It was 0230 and they were in between bouts of sex and well into their third bottle of wine and umpteenth round of " _Would You Rather_?"

"Ok… _ok_ ," Leonard mused. "Would you rather have no one show up to your funeral _or_ … have no one show up to your wedding?"

Her jaw drifted open and she stared at him listlessly. Suddenly, things stopped feeling so funny.

She thought of Roger, who left to go on that stupid expedition just days before they were supposed to get married and never came back. Everyone had been excited to show up to that wedding – everyone but the groom. She thought of her 416 dead _Constellation_ crewmembers, sorry that she'd missed their funerals when mortuary affairs sent the bodies back home. Those funerals had probably been small, because most of the people who would have shown up were busy having funerals of their own.

"Christine?"

It was probably just the alcohol, but tears started to prick the corners of her eyes. She set the bottle on the tousled sheets and looked away. No one liked an emotional drunk.

" _Great_ ," she thought angrily. " _Now I just made things weird_."

His thumb and forefinger caught her chin a soft pinch, and he leaned forward to deliver a tender kiss. His hand slid along her jaw and cradled her cheek and she leaned into him, desperate to feel any kind of companionship.

"I'm sorry," he whispered in between kisses. "I don't know what I did, but I'm sorry."

He tasted like bitter white wine, but she didn't care.

"I need you," she whispered. " _Please_."

She pulled him on top of her. The fourth time was different: tender, like the intersection between loneliness and comfort.

When her morning alarm went off at 0600, her legs were tangled with his, her face was resting on his chest, and a string of drool hung from her mouth. Her head was in agony.

"What _is_ that?" Leonard screeched, cupping his hands over his ears.

" _Computer – alarm off_ ," she yelled, sitting up to a wave of nausea. "Oh God."

She managed to turn just in time to heave most of the watery contents of her stomach into the automatic waste reclaimator by her bed. The angry pulsing in her temples raged harder. It had been years since she'd had a hangover, but then again, it had been years since she'd had more than two glasses of wine in one sitting.

She pulled herself up onto all fours, noting tenderness in her quadriceps, abdomen, and virtually all of her upper body. She sat on her haunches and contemplated the naked man twisted up in her sheets. _That probably explained the sore muscles_.

She gingerly stretched her arms over her head and inhaled several sharp breaths, fighting another spell of queasiness. Leonard's chin dipped into his chest and he began wheezing. _How could he go back to sleep so easily_?

She rose from the bed and examined her naked body. They had been rough with each other, that first time. She winced as she palpated her oblique muscles, wondering exactly what sexual position would make them hurt. She pivoted her neck to gaze at the sleeping man behind her, feeling awash with affection and regret.

There was the regret that she wouldn't have the chance to get to know him better, and the regret that she'd slept with a complete stranger just because he had a delightful accent, strong opinions, and gentle hands. No, not _regret_ exactly. Perhaps it was more correct to say she was angry with herself.

How could she already have feelings for someone she barely knew? It wasn't exactly the first time that had happened, but she thought she'd learned her lesson after Jim Kirk and Roger Korby.

Scenes from hours ago flashed through her mind; she remembered thinking of Roger and the _Constellation_ , _crying_ like a pitiful child, and Leonard's cool and nonjudgmental demeanor. He held her, and then made love to her in a way that made her feel both sad and fulfilled at the same time.

She rolled her eyes at her own sentimentality. She shuffled to her drawers, pulling her fingers through her tangled hair to smooth it down. There was a residual soreness in her right ankle from the sprain, but she had to admit, he'd done a pretty bang-up job. She stepped into a pair of clean underwear and grimaced from the aches riveting her body.

 _Ah_!"

Christine wheeled around to see Leonard sitting upright and clutching his head. He blinked furiously at her, peering through sticky eyelids. He yawned and fell back onto the mattress, massaging his face with his fingers. " _Why did you let me drink wine?"_

" _Shhhhh_!" she hissed, making a face and feeling her headache begin to throb harder. "You don't have to yell."

"Who's yelling?"

" _You_ are."

He propped himself up on his elbows to watch her fasten her bra. His eyes started to focus, and she noticed his eyebrows trending upward as he seemed to be recalling the events from the night before.

"What time is it?"

"Around 0600," she grumbled. "Good morning, by the way."

He squinted at her and worked his tongue around in his mouth. "Well, you're half right."

"What is _that_ supposed to mean?" she scowled, pulling her arms up to slip on a loose, light blue t-shirt.

"It means I haven't had a hangover like this in a few years," he explained, staring at the empty wine bottles on the floor.

"Me either," she admitted, stepping into a pair of black pants. "Say, _doctor_ , any chance you have access to hydrocortilene?"

"A woman after my own heart," he murmured, sitting up and rubbing his hands over his face. "Yeah, there are pre-synthesized stocks at the clinic."

She put her hands on her hips and stared at him, really considering him for the first time without desperation and alcohol clouding her judgment. She smiled a little to herself – she hadn't done too badly.

He looked around the room, and apparently realizing his pants were out of reach, he stood, allowing the thin sheet to fall from his waist. A bright flush spread across his cheeks. She smiled. _No, she hadn't done badly at all_.

The silence lingered between them like a weight and for a minute, the only sound came from the metal jingling of his belt buckle and the rustle of fabric as he dressed. She crossed her arms, leaning against the wall panel to observe his movements. He sat to put on his shoes, and as he finished tying the left one, she inched forward.

His gaze shifted from his footwear to her face. He paused when their eyes locked and Christine's heart beat a little faster in an annoying, girlish way. _Why was he making her feel so nervous_?

She offered a weak smile and ran her fingers through his messy hair to tame it down. He craned his neck upward; his face was almost touching her breasts. _What made him look so kissable_?

"You reek of booze," she crooned.

"Because _you_ smell like fresh cut grass after a spring rain?" he mocked.

She gave him a pointed look. "True enough."

"Don't suppose you mind if I replicate myself a toothbrush?" he drawled.

" _Please_." Though she tried to keep her face serious, it refused to comply and a tight smile spread over her lips.

He followed her to the lavatory and they stood huddled over the tiny sink in the corner, neither of them eager to look in the mirror. Her head still felt heavy and sluggish, and sudden movements threatened to bring up more bile.

"Let's go," she said, pitching her toothbrush on the counter.

He headed for the door while she tossed her PADD in her bag and slung it over her shoulder. Her stomach turned again and she clapped her hand over her mouth for a brief moment.

"You alright?" Leonard asked.

She nodded and gave him a once over, then reached forward and buttoned the top button of his shirt. His frown turned into a sneer, which transitioned into a lopsided smile.

"I don't want this walk of shame to be any worse," she explained.

His eyebrows flicked and the corner of his mouth flipped into a scowl as he reached across her to hit the door release button. If she didn't feel like a chubby baby was kicking her in the head, she might have been compelled to kiss him.

"Ladies first," he said, holding out a hand to allow her to pass.

 _What a lot of old-fashioned nonsense_. It was still cute when he did it though.

She walked into the hallway with a slight limp, flexing her right foot to see if she could stretch some of the soreness out.

"How's the ankle?" he asked, squinting against the hall's bright light.

"Fine," she admitted. "I guess I'm willing to concede you _might_ be a good physician."

"Thanks for your vote of overwhelming confidence."

Traffic was light in the corridors at 0615 on a Saturday morning, but Christine still felt judged by every person they passed and chose to keep her arms crossed and her eyes on her feet. The walk-in clinic was two levels up and one unit over and was thankfully closed on weekends so they didn't have the prying eyes of staffers dissecting their presence.

Leonard showed her inside and she instantly recognized the intersectional layout of the clinic. It was t-shaped: nurses' stations on one side, physician's offices on the other with exam rooms located in a long hallway in between. It allowed doctors and nurses to have some independence but allowed for some proximity. Christine hated it, viewing the design as an attempt to segregate two critical healthcare functions into cliques.

She looked right and left, and judging the left side to be more happily decorated and less-prison like, she turned to the right, because that's where the doctors would keep their offices, and where the doctors were, the drugs were.

"You sure seem to know your way around," he mused.

She explained the logic in her choice as they walked to the dispensary, earning her a quizzical look from the good southern doctor.

He opened the door with his access code and showed her in, and after a cursory glance, she headed for the first cabinet to locate a hypospray while he inventoried the lockers for hydrocortilene.

She could hear him clicking through the glass vials of pre-synthesized stocks and watched over his shoulder as he sorted. She primed the hypo and took a seat on a nearby stool, closing her eyes against the thundering in her head.

"Not very organized, is it?" she poked.

"This isn't my clinic," he shot back. " _My_ sickbay is organized."

" _Your_ sickbay? What, are you the sheriff?"

"Do you love bein' a wiseass or is it in your genes?" he retorted, putting an unusual amount of stress on the final word.

 _Funny how his accent got worse when he was irritated, like two scoops of adorable topped with moonshine and barbecue_.

"Sorry," she said, offering a look of apology.

Her sincerity almost seemed to confuse him. He shook his head, and then remembering he had a hangover, winced and pinched his forehead with his fingers.

"Do you mind if I have a seat so I can get at the computer and check the inventory logs?" he groaned.

She stood without saying a word, crossing her arms and leaning against the wall. He slumped onto the stool, swiped his finger across the monitor and began sifting through a number of programs.

She heard a muffled ding in her bag and extracted her PADD. _A message from Commander Zograf._

She frowned and pursed her lips, feeling her finger shake as she clicked on the screen to open it.

She skipped through the administrative headers at the top and saw the words _USS Enterprise-A_ in bold midway through the message. She was going to another Constitution-class starship: back to dangerous missions and deep space. She sighed and tapped the back of the PADD against her thighs in contemplation.

She had known this was coming, but now that it was real, a lot of old anxieties began to surface. The pounding in her head was becoming unbearable and all she wanted was to go back to sleep.

She summoned the courage to finish reading her orders, but the further she read, the worse her physical reaction became. Her heart thumped harder, her mouth was dry, and her knees starting shaking.

She was leaving in a little more than twenty-four hours on the _USS Enterprise-A_ under the command of… _Captain James T. Kirk_.

 _How could this happen_?

Jim Kirk – her first love, her first heartbreak, the man who drove her into the arms of Roger Korby, who _also_ later went on to break her heart. She'd dated Jim for three months when they were both cadets at the Academy, but he'd hooked up with some Orion girl and casually tossed her aside. It had taken months to pick up the pieces of her life after that, and now he was going to be her _boss_.

Her wounds _had_ healed: it had been five years and she hadn't really thought about him in a long time. But how was she supposed to work with a guy she'd had sex with – and they'd had a _lot_ of sex – and then later dumped her? This was why she'd decided not to date people in Starfleet. It was a huge organization with more than a million personnel, but somehow still small enough to make things messy.

She closed her eyes and slid her back down the wall to come to a squatting position. She heard Leonard shuffling around and opened one eye to observe him.

"You ok?" he drawled.

"I- _yeah_ ," she said, not wanting to drag the skeletons from the closet and parade them around.

He held up an aluminum vial of hydrocortilene and studied her. She sighed and held out her hand, slipping it into the hypo's chamber and adjusting the dosage. "Is 10 ccs good?"

"Should do it," he agreed.

The computer dinged. A few seconds later, it dinged again. And again. _And again_.

"Sounds like you've got a fan club with all those messages," she smirked.

He rolled his eyes and helped her to her feet. He was strong and overcompensated, causing her to fall forward into his chest. He caught her and they exchanged weak smiles. It might have been romantic if they didn't feel so terrible. She gave him his injection and recharged the dose for herself. He gave her a strange look, making her suddenly feel self-conscious.

"What?"

"Didn't even feel it," he replied, rubbing his neck. "Maybe I should admit you _might_ be a good nurse."

She scowled, but despite everything, her face refused to be annoyed and her lips started to crack into a smile. The computer continued to chime new message alerts.

"You should probably check those," she said, injecting herself with 10 ccs of the analgesic.

He rubbed his face vigorously and collapsed into the stool once again. The hydrocortilene was already working its magic and she could feel the throbbing and nausea beginning to recede.

"Oh, great," he seethed. " _Of course_. They took their time in fillin' my personnel roster and now I've got less than forty-eight hours to process 78 people."

" _Huh_?"

"They think they can just-"

"Who is _they_?" she interrupted, wondering what had him so bothered.

"Personnel resources! They just do whatever they want."

She could see him internally lamenting his woes as he scrolled through a long list. Then he froze.

"Christine?"

"Yeah?"

"Christine _Chapel_?"

She didn't remember telling him her last name, but she _had_ been pretty drunk. " _Yeah_? What?"

He whipped around on his stool. His face was white and for once, he seemed rendered speechless, until he said, " _Oh my God_."


	5. That Sweet, Sweet Surprise

She had looked rough because of the hangover. Then she had given herself the hydrocortilene and was _just_ starting to get color back in her cheeks when he sprung the news on her. Now thanks to a cruel twist of fate, irony, luck, or some other blameless, abstract entity, her face was ghost white once again.

"But- but you," she breathed. " _You're_ the Chief Medical Officer of the _Enterprise_?"

"And it sounds like you're the new head nurse," he said, noting the regrettable singsong quality of his voice. " _Congratulations_."

"Don't _congratulate_ me," she snapped. "What do we _do_?"

"I… don't know," he admitted.

She was sitting on the floor staring listlessly at the tile with her limp hands draped in her lap. "I didn't think I was ever going to see you again."

"You and me both," Bones replied.

A heavy silence split the air as they sat, pondering the seriousness of this new revelation. Maybe it wasn't as bad as they thought. She seemed to like him, he _definitely_ liked her, and though he outranked her, he wasn't in her direct chain of command. Sure, they would work together, but doctors and nurses danced to completely different drums. Besides, Commander Spock and Lieutenant Uhura made things work despite seeing each other on the bridge every day and carried on with almost annoying professionalism.

"I can't do this," she declared, taking several deep breaths. "First him and now you. What have I done?"

"What are you talking about?"

"I should go," she said, leaping to her feet and thrusting the hypo in his hands.

"Christine, wait-"

"I think you should probably get used to calling me Nurse Chapel," she interrupted, throwing her bag over her shoulder and racing out of the dispensary.

"So that's it then? You don't even want to talk about this?"

"What's there to say, Leo- Dr. McCoy?" she said, her voice catching in her throat. "I should go. Good luck with your inprocessing."

He stared at her, remembering why he hadn't spent a lot of time in the company of women lately. They were so damn confusing. First they shared an amazing date, followed it up with some of the best sex he'd had in a decade, and now they had the chance to have a relationship and it was " _Thanks for nothing, Dr. McCoy but good luck_?"

"I was kinda hoping you'd offer to help," he called after her. "What with being the new head nurse and all. I have 78 people to inprocess, including you."

She held up her PADD in her hand and wheeled around. "I'm not your new head nurse yet: not for another day or so. I- I need to go talk to someone. _Please_. Excuse me."

She stumbled as she turned on her heel to shuffle out of the clinic at near warp speed. She almost seemed on the verge of tears. What had he done? Or was that the prospect of working with him every day just _that_ nauseating to her? He almost went after her but decided not to bother; he'd chased after his ex-wife too many times to know that sometimes women just wanted to be alone.

He locked down the dispensary and trudged to his office, throwing a doctor's coat over his civilian clothes on his way to his desk. He started reviewing the medical records for all the newcomers, determining who would need full physicals or vaccines, who was already on Yorktown and who would arrive later, and making notes on certain files with unusual or incomplete information.

He definitely could have used her help, and the more involved he became in the task, the more agitated he became. Personnel resources was lazy for dumping this on him at the last minute. Other Starfleet physicians were reckless for not updating medical records or keeping up with routine exams. Then there was _Christine_. Even if their romp was the biggest regret of her life, surely she could figure out how to be professional enough to work together?

His vision was blurring from exhaustion and the residual effects of the hangover and hydrocortilene. He pinched the bridge of his nose and whispered, " _damn_ " to no one in particular.

It wasn't as bad as he thought. Though he had to review the medical files of all 78 incoming personnel, he only had to perform physicals on people who hadn't received one within the past year and almost everyone was up to date on the vaccines. Two hours later, he was halfway through the list and had identified only six people who would actually need to come in and see him.

Then he arrived at Christine's – correction, _Nurse Chapel's_ – file and noticed the recently cleared orange code. She had been receiving psychological treatment but was now cleared for duty. That was no big deal, since most of the _Enterprise_ 's crew was in the same boat, but he was curious.

He opened the file and began to read and very quickly got a sense for what had made her cry last night when he'd asked her preference on weddings or funerals over that ridiculous drinking game. She had been one of the 14 survivors of the _Constellation_ , de facto commander, in fact. He sighed and cradled his forehead in his left hand. Maybe her reaction had nothing to do with him at all. _Who could say_?

He finished with the list several hours later and sent messages to the personnel he'd identified, asking them to report to sickbay within 24 hours after boarding the ship for their necessary physicals, vaccinations, or prescriptions. He also sent a message to his new medical staff, including Nurse Chapel, welcoming them to the _Enterprise_ and giving them a brief introduction of his expectations as Chief Medical Officer.

He was about to power down the terminal and go back to his quarters to shower and sleep off the remains of last night, but he hesitated. He wanted to review Starfleet's fraternization policy.

He knew the policy statement well enough, but mostly as it related to medical ethics and confidentiality. As CMO, he was on the front lines of the sexual arena that inevitably formed when hundreds of youngish, lonely, intelligent people were packed into a flying sardine can for years on end. Almost everyone came in the end, traipsing through his sickbay for emergency contraceptives, awkward anatomy questions, and the occasional sexually transmitted disease.

He always took care to treat everyone without judgment as was required by his medical oath, but naturally some of those patients had made him raise his eyebrows and scratch his head over the years. How _did_ Ensign Keenser, a man with acidic saliva, get so many human girlfriends?

In general, Starfleet didn't care much about relationships so long as the mission was accomplished and a certain standard of professionalism was maintained. Enforcing Starfleet's fraternization policy was the responsibility of starship captains, and as far as he knew, Jim had been forced to pull some people to the side over the years for a private talk, but had never formally reprimanded anyone.

He finally located up the policy statement in the database. He had two options – a printed version or a holographic projection of Admiral Morrow delivering it in an address. He rolled his eyes and chose the former option.

 _Starfleet encourages a diverse and supportive atmosphere, but due to the nature of its continuing mission and the wide cultural differences among our personnel, it is necessary to establish certain boundaries. This policy is designed to be personnel-oriented and demonstrate sensitivity and respect for all social and cultural practices, not to control behavior or punish or appear to punish interpersonal relationships. This policy is intended to maintain image and morale, protect and ensure fair and impartial treatment of subordinates, and maintain organizational integrity and the ability to achieve operational goals in any environment._

 _It is evident that many workplace friendships flow naturally into personal lives, which is unremarkable given the commonalities that many colleagues share such as proximity, mutual interests, age, and career goals. These friendships and romances often positively affect the workplace by adding to the sense of teamwork and camaraderie, but sometimes these relationships can falter and result in friction and conflict._

 _Therefore interpersonal relationships between personnel may become a concern if they have the effect of impairing work; harassing, demeaning, or creating a negative working environment; disrupting the smooth and orderly flow of work within the working environment; establishing quid pro quo arrangements; or harming the goodwill and reputation of Starfleet or the Federation at large._

 _It is important to note that a relationship does not have to be sexual in nature to be in violation of this policy; any relationship determined to cause an actual or perceived situation that negatively impacts good order and discipline may be considered inappropriate. In addition to romantic and sexual liaisons, other notable examples of potentially inappropriate relationships between personnel include gambling, ongoing business relationships, financial transactions, direct student-teacher relationships within Starfleet Academy and other training organizations, and insubordination through excessive familiarity and disrespect of rank._

 _However, most contact or association between personnel does not constitute a violation of this policy. Whether the contact or association in question is a violation depends on the surrounding circumstances. Factors to be considered include whether the conduct has compromised the chain of command, resulted in the appearance of partiality, or otherwise undermined good order, discipline, authority, or morale._

 _The acts and circumstances must be such as to lead a reasonable person experienced in the problems of organizational leadership to conclude that the good order and discipline of Starfleet has been disregarded. Enforcement of this policy rests with commanders and is in effect at all times, whether on or off Starfleet premises._

 _Ex Astris, Scientia  
Fleet Admiral Harry Morrow  
Starfleet Commander in Chief_

"Thanks, Admiral Morrow," he said aloud, cursing the memorandum. "Like _that's_ not vague."

In essence, it seemed everything and nothing was fraternization to a degree. He had no idea what Chris- Nurse Chapel's opinion on it was, but at least he had a clearer understanding. They hadn't violated policy just by sleeping together. Hell, they didn't even know they would be working together until just a few hours ago. _Why had she run away_?

He gritted his teeth and rubbed his face with his fingertips, enjoying the firm pressure, but a soft clicking approaching from down the hall piqued his interest. _Had she come back?_ He leaned forward on the stool and scowled.

"Hey Bones, I've been trying to reach you on your communicator but I ended up using Yorktown's computers to locate you here."

He slumped back on the stool. "What's up, Jim?"

His captain wandered into the office, arms crossed and looking uncomfortable. His eyes darted over his shoulder. "Are you reading Starfleet's fraternization policy?"

Bones wheeled around on the stool and powered the monitor off. "Yeah, long story. Anyway, what brings you here?"

"I feel like I should be busier than I am," his friend admitted, leaning against the wall and uttering a lengthy sigh. "Scotty's walked every centimeter of the ship and says it's good, Spock has the commissioning ceremony handled, personnel resources finally filled in the gaps, and logistics finally cleared us to get underway."

"Yeah, I got the final by-name list of new personnel earlier this morning," Leonard admitted. "I've been sorting that out."

"I was wondering why you were in the clinic on a Saturday morning," Jim admitted. "Early night last night?"

"Not exactly," he replied with a weak smile. "I- it's… _complicated_."

"Yeah, you look awful."

" _Thanks_ ," Leonard sneered, wanting to be offended but realizing his friend was right.

"You _do_ ," Jim shrugged. "So what _did_ you do last night? Did you take my advice and hit up speed dating?"

 _What great advice that had been_. The new head nurse hadn't even officially begun her duties and already wasn't speaking to him. He could hardly blame Jim for that though. "I really don't want to talk about it. Like I said, it's _complicated_."

Jim shot him a boyish look and squinted his eyes as if he'd just stumbled upon some rare piece of nostalgia. A decade of friendship had taught them how to read one another as well as any two people could, and Jim wisely decided to drop the issue. He nodded, uncrossed his arms, and took up picking at his fingernails.

" _Complicated_ ," Jim scoffed, his face twisting into an unusual expression. "Sure."

"What's wrong, Jim?"

"I have my own complications."

"I take it you didn't come all the way down to the clinic just to say _that_ ," Leonard replied. "So shoot. What's on your mind?"

"I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of," Jim muttered.

"Haven't we all?"

"I could really use a drink," Jim grumbled. "Too bad it's only 1015 on a Saturday morning."

"I think I need to quit drinkin' for a while," Bones replied.

An expression of shock spread across his friend's face, culminating in a barking laugh. "You must have had one interesting night."

"Are we talkin' about me or we talkin' about _you_?"

Jim held up his hands and nodded. "Fair enough."

"So what is it _really_?"

"Well, like you, I got the new personnel roster this morning and started reviewing everyone's files. I figured I'd get a jump on trying to figure out where to assign people. Scotty's been driving me nuts asking for a third maintenance shift because his people are overworked and Spock wants to adjust the bridge schedule to a rotating-"

"Cut to the point, Jim."

"There's a problem with the new head nurse."

He autonomic nervous system switched into high gear, driving up his heart rate, dilating his pupils, and elevating the hair follicles on the back of his neck. His mouth felt very dry and his hands formed into instinctive fists. _Did Jim know_?

"What… _kind_ of problem?"

Jim tucked his hands in his pockets and stared down at the tips of his shoes. "We had some wild times back at the Academy, didn't we?"

 _What the hell was he talking about_?

"Well, that was mostly _you_. I was there a lot of the time, trying to keep you alive and out of the commandant's office. Out of _prison_ a few times. But what's that got to do with the new head nurse?"

"Her name is Christine."

"I know." _Of course he knew_. He'd been moaning it into her ear less than twelve hours ago. "Christine Chapel, I believe."

"We uh- dated for a few months in my last year at the Academy," he mumbled.

His physical symptoms only seemed to get worse. His mouth was like cotton now, and Jim's voice started sounding like it was coming through a tunnel. "So- so what's the problem?"

"I messed up with a lot of women back then, but I _really_ messed up with Christine. She was one of Carol's really good friends. I guess… I don't know."

Bones stared at Jim, wondering just what in the hell he was supposed to say. Carol Marcus was the love of Jim's life but she'd left the mission two years ago for reasons known only to her. Jim had taken it _hard_. They'd spent many nights in the bottle analyzing the former assistant science officer, and in the end, Jim had finally admitted Carol wasn't interested in a relationship with someone who had charmed and abandoned several of her closest friends.

Bones appreciated her loyalty. If some woman had done that to Jim, or Scotty or M'Benga or Chekov or even Spock, he wouldn't want anything to do with her either. Jim rationally understood that but it hurt to know the truth, and apparently it was hurting him still.

"She was such a good person Bones," Jim sighed. "And _smoking_ hot. And the _sex_ …"

Jim's words started to fade out as Bones' jaw clenched and a knot started growing in his stomach. He took several slow breaths and turned his focus back to his friend.

"But she really liked me and I really liked her too. She was really smart and had this amazing sense of humor. And her _legs_ …" Jim's face shifted to some faraway memory and Leonard felt his jealously and anxiety threatening to boil over. "I had a good thing going with her and I threw it all away to hook up with- well, it doesn't matter."

Leonard tried to form a coherent response but his mind kept getting stuck on the fact that he and Jim had slept with the same woman. He didn't know which emotions to start processing first.

"Don't you have _any_ advice?" Jim whined.

All things considered, Leonard thought he was a little more deserving in the advice department at the moment. How could something like this happen? He also felt like he would have remembered Jim dating Christine, but there had been so many women and Leonard had never been good with faces.

"So when exactly did you date this… this Christine Chapel?" he stammered, trying to sound casual. "I remember most of your Academy girlfriends, at least most of the ones that weren't weird flings and one-night stands."

"It was at the start of the last term. I think you were away at some kind of Starfleet medical extension course. I also stopped bringing girls back to the room because you complained all the time."

Bones closed his eyes and exhaled a woeful sigh. He liked Christine a lot and now Christine didn't seem to want anything to do with him. And as it turned out, his best friend had broken her heart. _And_ slept with her. How had his life ventured into soap opera territory on a random Saturday morning? The only way it could get worse would be to find out she was also married to Spock or had Jim's secret love child. His eyes popped wide open at the thought and he ran his hands over his face.

"Do you uh- still have feelings for her?" Bones mumbled.

Jim leaned his head against the wall and considered the question. "No, I don't think so. I haven't seen her in five years. I mostly just feel bad because now I'm her superior officer. I feel like I owe her another apology, a _sincere_ apology. Do you know how _weird_ this is going to be?"

Bones dropped his hands from his face and gazed at Jim, thinking, " _Not as weird for you as it is for me_."

His friend's pained expression made him realize he was at a critical point. Jim was his best friend and he had to come clean, right now, before things got any worse. Even though Jim just admitted he didn't still have romantic feelings for Christine, he didn't feel right keeping something like this from him.

"Look, Jim, about last night-"

A communicator chirped in Jim's pocket and he held up a finger and shot him an apologetic look. " _Kirk here_."

Spock's voice crackled through the device and Jim started scowling. Bones wasn't really paying attention, but focused his thoughts on how to explain this mess to his best friend. Unfortunately he wasn't going to get the chance. Jim snapped the communicator closed and headed for the door, mumbling something about the commissioning ceremony.

"Jim, we really need to talk," he insisted.

"Yeah," Jim nodded. "We _will_ , but right now I gotta go deal with this. Hit me up later, ok?"

"Yeah, _sure_ ," Leonard agreed, feeling the anxiety building in his gut.

He needed to get this off his chest but wanted the right time to do it, and he was pretty sure the "right time" had just walked out the door with Jim. He also wanted to talk to Christine. Did _she_ know? Was that why she'd left in such a damn hurry? Did she still have feelings for Jim? What a mess.

He'd picked a hell of a day to quit drinking. That was for sure.


	6. Kicking and Screaming

"Commander Zograf, _please_."

"Lieutenant, it's Saturday, I'm trying to have a quiet breakfast, and if I remember right, you said you didn't care _where_ you got assigned. It seems a little late for a change of heart."

"Commander, I apologize for interrupting your breakfast," she murmured. "But please. Anywhere but the _Enterprise-A_."

"I've already filled the other possible assignments you could have had," he replied. "And if I took you off the _Enterprise-A_ , I'd be leaving that ship without a chief nurse."

"I can't be the only person qualified to fill the position."

"You're the only person qualified within thirty light years and the ship is being commissioned tomorrow."

She wanted to ask why he would have waited until the last minute to fill the chief nurse position, but rather than insinuate he was lazy and incompetent, she decided to try and keep her cool. "There has to be someone else that could take the job besides me. _Surely_?"

"No," Zograf mused, speaking around the large chunk of biscuit in his mouth.

She felt compelled to take a seat across from him and argue her case but she sensed that would be overstepping a boundary. She'd been on her way to her quarters to send him an emergency message and beg for a new assignment when she'd just happened to see him on the patio of one of the plaza's many eateries and asked to speak to him. He'd reluctantly agreed but the look on his face clearly said he was growing tired of entertaining her and she didn't want to push her luck.

"Commander Zograf, I-"

"Christine," he interrupted, sending flecks of savory pastry flying in her direction, "there's really nothing I can do. The _Enterprise-A_ is due to get underway in less than twenty-four hours."

There he went using her first name again, like they were old friends, pretending like he wasn't screwing her into the worst assignment she could imagine. Then she had an idea. "What if I could find another nurse willing to take my assignment?"

It wasn't unheard of for people to swap postings and she had a lot of friends from the Academy that would probably take the chief nurse position on the fleet's flagship in a heartbeat. None of them were at Yorktown, but maybe she could work out a deal with Zograf and Jim – correction, _Captain Kirk_ – to let the chief nurse slot sit empty for a month or two.

"That's really out of the question," Zograf growled, buttering a third biscuit with merciless fervor. "I don't understand what your problem is: the _Enterprise-A_ only has eighteen months left on its current mission. I thought you would be happy, because our original deal was for two years. Suck it up, do your time, and after that, you'll be on assignment to a Starfleet hospital in San Francisco. That was the deal."

"But _sir_ -"

"This conversation is over, Lieutenant Chapel. I'd like to get back to my breakfast. You're dismissed."

She felt the color rising in her cheeks. As annoying as Zograf's familiarity had been, the use of her rank and surname told her she had lost. There was no point in continuing to fight and embarrassing herself. She nodded and without another word, turned on her heel and shuffled away from the restaurant patio.

What _now_?

She continued the slow trudge to her room, trying to convince herself things might not be as bad as she thought when she heard her PADD ding in her purse. _What fresh hell could this be_?

It turned out to be a message from her new lover turned Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Leonard McCoy. Her thoughts flashed to the night before and she shook her head furiously, trying to fling the memory out of her mind. In addition to the recollection of his hands on her body, she still had his sweat on her skin. _His sweat_.

How _childish_ she'd been, bolting out of the clinic pharmacy without any explanation. The news about Jim – correction, Captain Kirk – hadn't even really sunk in when she'd found out about Leonard – _correction_ , Dr. McCoy. She'd started to feel overwhelmed and gave into her emotional instinct to flee.

It was what she'd always done – run away before others could see her panic or cry. Her breakup with Jim had been public and painful, and he'd _laughed_. All the onlookers had laughed too.

She stopped and slumped onto a nearby bench overlooking the lower decks and stared into space without reading the message.

Surely Jim Kirk had changed. They wouldn't have given command of a starship to an arrogant man-child who didn't care about shredding someone's feelings in full view of an audience, would they? Then again, a lazy, self-important _idiot_ like Zograf had been put in charge of managing all personnel assignments in this sector, so she supposed anything was possible.

She'd cringed when she heard Jim Kirk had been given his own command right out of the Academy. Christine had even been offered an assignment aboard his ship, but had opted for an assignment to the newer _USS Constellation_ for obvious reasons. She'd heard about his demotion a year later after violating the Prime Directive and thought Starfleet had come to its senses, but then they'd given the ship right back to him so he could crash it into San Francisco whilst chasing after some terrorist. He'd killed thousands of innocent civilians and maimed thousands more in that little stunt, and that _still_ obviously hadn't been enough to warrant any kind of reprimand.

After arriving at Yorktown, she'd heard all about how he'd lost the _Enterprise_ and half its crew on a mission into an uncharted nebula and had led some kind of alien army back to the star base and gotten _more_ people killed. Captain Kirk didn't seem like a bad captain, he seemed like the _worst_ captain. Apparently to admirals who mattered though, James Tiberius Kirk could piss success and do no wrong and now he was going to be her boss and there was nothing she could do about it.

No, she thought wildly. Not _nothing_ … She could resign her commission.

She felt a painful pull in her gut and shame at her passing, immature instinct. Starfleet had been the only thing keeping her sane after Roger had left. Her mother had passed away two years ago and there was really nothing tethering her to Ohio – or _Earth,_ for that matter – anymore. The crew of the _Constellation_ had become her family, but now they were _gone_.

She was adrift in her own existence, lonely and without a home. She had friends scattered throughout two quadrants, but no one she was really close to anymore. No wonder she'd wasted no time stripping off her clothes and jumping into the arms of the first guy who came along. If anything, she was surprised she hadn't done it _sooner_ and thankful the guy wasn't a complete waste of oxygen. The psychologists had warned her about self-destructive behavior following such a catastrophic loss, but she'd rolled her eyes and told them she'd be fine.

Leonard McCoy didn't _feel_ like self-destruction or the inevitable result of too much alcohol and loneliness though; he felt good and he made her laugh. He seemed like such a genuine person and a guy with whom she might be interested in pursuing a relationship. Too bad she was an emotional mess and he was in Starfleet and she had a strict policy about avoiding men in uniform.

The panic welling in her chest intensified. She was going to see him every day. She had always understood that in an abstract way, but the more she thought about the reality of it, the more horrified she started to feel. She'd embarrassed herself in just about every way possible: the alcohol, the sex, the running away. How could they _ever_ have a normal working relationship after last night?

She could do her best to steer clear of the captain, but _Dr. McCoy_? He was the Chief Medical Officer and she was the Chief Nurse. By regulation they _had_ to work similar shifts to coordinate operations. Starships were small and it was hard enough avoiding mechanics from the deepest pits of engineering for long periods; avoiding Leonard McCoy would be _impossible_.

Negative thoughts continued to surface. What if he _told_ people? He didn't seem like the type to do such a thing, but she barely knew him. Even if he _did_ keep his mouth shut, people might still find out. Who was she kidding? People _always_ found those kinds of things out. What if people found out about her and the _captain_? There would be rumors and gossip and so much worse…

She felt sick to her stomach. She didn't want to go trekking through deep space under the command of a reckless egotist or be forced to work with her recent one-night stand. She also didn't want to leave Starfleet. What _did_ she want?

That was an easy question to answer. She wanted her old life back. She wanted to have coffee with Nurse Drury after their shift and play table tennis in the recreation room with Ensign Zhao on her days off. But Ethel Drury and Li Zhao were dead, the _Constellation_ was gone, and Christine Chapel had walked into the worst assignment she could have envisioned for herself. Her face grew hot and she felt tears threatening to cascade down her cheeks when her PADD chirped again. She jumped.

"Are you alright?"

She took a deep breath and looked up to see a young woman with dark eyes staring at her with concern. "Oh yeah, just having one of those days, you know?"

"Are you sure?" the woman asked.

"I'm fine, really," Christine insisted. "In fact, I need to get going, but thanks for checking on me."

She stood faster than she meant to and rushed away without giving the woman a second look. It annoyed her that she could get so emotional and couldn't shake the compulsion to run away from her problems. _What a great Chief Nurse she was shaping up to be_.

She slinked into her room and was hit with a fresh wave of regret. The bed sheets were still in disarray and last night's wine bottles littered the floor. She flopped down, stared at the ceiling, and did her best not to think about what she'd been doing in that very spot just hours ago.

Her PADD chirped a third time and she felt a fleeting, maniacal urge to hurl it into the wall, but instead she calmly collected the device and scanned through a message from Captain James T. Kirk. Her lip curled reflexively.

It was a general message addressed to the entire crew, giving a report time of 1000 hours for the commissioning ceremony the following morning. She frowned, recalling how excited she'd been during the _Constellation_ 's commissioning several years earlier.

She'd been a newly minted ensign sporting a dress uniform without any awards or decorations, thrilled at the opportunity to run away from San Francisco and Roger and leave the Academy behind. At the ceremony's conclusion, Captain Decker had ordered the crew to " _board our ship and bring her to life_!" – a tradition dating back centuries to a time when ships navigated oceans instead of the vast expanse of space.

She grimaced and closed the message but realized she had two unread in her inbox – the one from Dr. McCoy and one from someone named Commander Spock. She opened the latter and skimmed over the highlights. He was apparently the ship's first officer, and the message was full of precise instructions about securing quarters and reporting for shift assignments.

A single line of text jumped out at her. She needed to have her personal effects packed and beamed aboard the ship by 1200 hours _today_. That was in less than two hours.

She leapt to her feet, feeling a surge of agitation at Commander Zograf for assigning her to the _Enterprise-A_ at the last minute, at Commander Spock for having a ridiculously early deadline, at James Kirk for being an cocky, womanizing ass, and at Leonard McCoy for being an inconvenient complication in her already complicated life.

Packing her things proved easy because she'd lost everything aboard the _Constellation_. All she had were her recently issued uniforms and professional equipment, along with a few toiletries, a few civilian outfits, and knick knacks she'd accrued since she'd arrive at Yorktown.

As she folded the dress she'd worn the night before into her trunk, she felt a weird emotion she couldn't name. It was a mixture of lust, regret, longing, embarrassment, and hope. She sighed and tossed the garment and matching shoes into the heavy, black case, slammed it shut, and stacked it on the transporter lock pad in the corner of the room. She hauled the professional med kit from the back of the closet and felt the nameless emotion grow stronger as she recalled the feel of Leonard's hands on her ankle.

 _McCoy_. His name was Dr. McCoy.

What should have taken her a whole day took less than half an hour: clearly there were advantages to traveling light. When she was done, she pulled up Commander Spock's message, found her room assignment, and clicked the link to one of the ship's transporter rooms to get her things in the queue to be transported to her quarters.

She gave the technician the coordinates posted on the wall of her room on Yorktown as well as the location of her future quarters aboard _Enterprise-A_. He told her to standby and seconds later, her things disappeared into a matter stream. The crew was efficient, at least. _That_ was something. Now _what_?

She _should_ have gone down to the _Enterprise-A_ , located her room, and started unpacking, but she figured she'd have plenty of time for that in the coming weeks. She'd left her dress uniform hanging in the closet under the assumption she'd spend one last night in her quarters on Yorktown before going down to the commissioning ceremony the next morning, so she really had everything she needed until tomorrow.

She fell back onto her bed and started reanalyzing her problem, but obviously nothing had changed. She tried to be positive – after everything that had happened, surely working with an ex-boyfriend and a recent fling wasn't the _worst_ thing? She knew several people who'd served under Captain Kirk and none of them had come away from the experience any worse for wear. The ones who'd _survived_ , anyway.

Carol Marcus, one of her best friends from the Academy, had spent several years aboard _Enterprise_ before calling it quits and leaving to work on developing a terraforming device. They'd drifted apart after graduation – time and geography had a funny way of doing that – but they still spoke on rare occasion. She thought about reaching out to Carol and asking her advice on getting through this. After all, it had been Carol who'd helped her pick up the remnants of her life after both Jim and Roger, but Christine didn't want to be the kind of friend who only called when she had a problem.

She closed her eyes and tried to piece it together. She disliked James Kirk a lot, but would have to find a way to get over that. She _liked_ Leonard McCoy a lot, but she would have to get over that too. Even if she relaxed her personal policy about dating men in Starfleet, she couldn't date her CMO. Even if it wasn't _technically_ fraternization, she'd seen too many inter-ship romances turn ugly. Besides, she didn't even know if _he_ wanted to date _her_. It was safe to assume he probably was no longer interested after the way she'd treated him earlier that morning.

She found it harder and harder to keep her eyelids open, and soon she was lost in a forest of dreams which included interludes of Jim Kirk riding a giant, planet-killing weapon, lying in bed with Leonard, and table tennis with Roger, but every time she hit the ball down the table, she would look up and find Commander Zograf instead, telling her to accept her inevitable death.

When she woke up, she didn't believe the time on her PADD. How could it _possibly_ be 0915? She reconfirmed it with Yorktown's computers and flew from the bed, leaping into the shower with a stride that would impress a gazelle. She stuffed the blue t-shirt and black pants into the matter reclaimator and raced through an abridged hygiene routine.

She recoiled when she looked in the mirror and saw the bags under her eyes and the angry, red pimple forming on her chin. She jerked her hair into a low bun at the nape of her neck and proceeded to stagger around the room, pulling on the sleek gray dress uniform while she finished pinning loose strands of hair in place.

She tucked her PADD into the back waistband of her pencil skirt and covered it with her jacket, and them stepped into her shoes as she fled from the room. She wouldn't have time to check out of her quarters, but decided she'd rather be rude to the Yorktown billeting office than late for the _Enterprise-A_ 's commissioning ceremony. She paused to stare at the room as she left, realizing today marked the first day of… _she didn't know_. _Probably a lot of really awkward days_.

She kept a pace between marching and jogging all the way down to E Dock and twenty minutes later, she quickly lost herself in a sea of uniformed personnel. The ceremony to commission the Federation's flagship wasn't going to be a small one; that was for sure. She'd already seen more admirals in five minutes than she had in her entire career. She stood on the tips of her toes and could see the crew formation area by the starboard side of the saucer section.

She waded through the throngs of people and nearly got knocked over by a portly man swinging his arms to make a point to an alien whose species she couldn't identify. A strong hand caught her just before she toppled over and she turned around to see a handsome Vulcan man clutching her shoulders. _Very_ handsome.

Christine gave her head a little shake. He might be attractive and maybe she might be interested if she'd crossed paths with him in some other life, but she had enough problems with men as it was.

"Excuse me," she breathed, trying to project her voice over the din. "And thank you for catching me."

"You are welcome," he replied. "Are you with the _Enterprise_ crew?"

Her eyes darted to the pips on his sleeve. "Uh, yes, I'm trying to figure out where I need to be, Commander…?"

"Spock," he replied. "May I ask with whom I speak?"

"Sorry, sir," she said, leaning closer to hear him over the crowd. "Lieutenant Christine Chapel. I'm the new Chief Nurse. I didn't realize I was addressing the ship's first officer."

"I am honored to make your acquaintance," he responded, gesturing with his hand to something behind her. "The medical staff are assembling there."

"Thank you for your help, sir."

"Certainly."

The momentum of the crowd began to shift and she got the sense the ceremony was about to start. She pushed her way through the pulsing mob but faltered when she heard a familiar voice over her shoulder.

"Jim, we _really_ need to talk."

A response came from another recognizable voice, one she hadn't heard in more than five years. "I'm busy right now, Bones. Ceremony starts in five minutes."

She gritted her teeth and tried to hurry but a procession of equipment containers inching along aboard a hoverjack blocked her path.

"I've got eyes, don't I?" Dr. McCoy growled. "But you blew me off all night last night and it's _important_. It's about-"

His words clung to the air and she froze, turning to see the two of them standing _together_. Leonard McCoy had managed to tame his hair and looked striking in his dress uniform, and of course James Kirk could find a way to look sharp in a burlap sack. He hadn't changed a bit, at least on the outside.

Words. She should say _words_. _Which_ words?

Captain Kirk beat her to it, though his tone lacked the characteristic swaggering charm she had been so accustomed to. "Nurse Chapel, it's good to see you."

"Aye, sir," she replied, noting the uncomfortably high pitch of her voice.

Ancient memories brought old wounds to the surface, and though they were no longer raw and painful, they were more vivid than she would have thought after all this time. She dared herself to look at his face. His expression was soft and his eyes seemed anxious. She thought she could die of shock. Was Jim Kirk _actually_ nervous?

"Uh- I- uh- I gotta get up to the podium so we can get this over with," he mumbled. "This is Bones- sorry, Dr. McCoy. He's the CMO. You'll learn to call him Bones. We all do. Anyway, he'll show you where to go."

She clenched her jaw and allowed her eyes to travel to Leonard. His expression was unrecognizable.

"You're in good hands," the captain added, flashing a weak smile and slapping the doctor on the shoulder before darting in the direction of a small podium up ahead.

Time and movement seemed to slow and she felt very aware of every muscle twitch and breath. Their eyes met and she hated that she had no idea what he was thinking. She hated that she had no idea what _she_ was thinking in that moment. She wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go.

The loudspeaker crackled and snapped her back to the present. "Guests and crew, the ceremony will begin in two minutes. Please take your places."

The doctor's eyes rolled and he turned and waited, allowing her to pass. "Let's get this damn dog and pony show over with."

She nodded and breezed past him but didn't reply. He seemed angry. Was he angry?

 _Why did men have to be so complicated_?


	7. A New Crisis

"Before we charted the heavens, many of us sailed the seas," Jim said, adjusting the tight collar of his uniform as he addressed his crew and the assembled crowd. Leonard thought the man looked like a squirmy poodle, groomed and ruffled and on display. He glanced down at his own dress uniform and caught Christine trying very hard not to look in his direction, but she also didn't seem to be interested in listening to the captain speak either.

"Though we come from different planets, we're not so different. Sailors have always been superstitious, as evidenced by our diverse ceremonies celebrating the birth of a new ship. Ancient humans used to slaughter animals or pour wine on the new vessel to honor gods of the sea and later switched to smashing a bottle of champagne over the bow or cutting the rope tethering the ship to the place of its construction with a silver axe."

Leonard saw Christine fidget from the corner of his eye. He couldn't blame her. He'd thought about her all night. He'd thought about contacting her but didn't in the end because he didn't know what he was supposed to say. He tried putting himself in her shoes and figured it must be hard to date someone, have it end badly, and then have that person end up being her boss. Jim was his best friend but Leonard couldn't forget their Academy days; Jim had been the _messiah_ of broken hearts. His eyes flicked back to the podium.

"Andorians used to keep a candle burning in the cargo hold to ward off evil ice demons," Jim said, sliding his finger around the inside of his collar to loosen it. He looked so uncomfortable. They were _all_ uncomfortable.

" _We came here to board a ship, not get a history lesson_ ," Leonard thought, feeling a flicker of annoyance. " _Just get on with it, man_."

Jim droned for many more minutes and it was starting to piss Leonard right off. All he wanted was to talk to Christine and make this whole thing a lot less awkward, and Jim was carrying on about Risian mythology and Vulcan starcharts. After what felt like an hour, Jim finally said, " _Crew, board our ship and bring her to life_!" and the front ranks of personnel started to file into their brand new flying death trap.

Leonard turned on his heel and walked toward the boarding ramp, staring at the back of Christine's head and wondering what was going through her mind. As they stepped aboard the _Enterprise-A_ , the crew's calm, ceremonial walk turned into disarray. People were moving every which way, some going to their quarters and others trying to report to their supervisors.

Though the ship was leaving the space dock, it wasn't actually getting underway for another three hours. He wanted to get to sickbay almost as much as he wanted to change out of the ridiculous monkey suit with the tight collar. He pulled at the starched fabric around his neck, supposing he'd put on a little more weight than he'd realized.

"Hey, Dr. McCoy," someone called behind him.

He wheeled around to see Maria Heikkinen, the only nurse left from the original crew. He turned to introduce Christine to her, but his new head nurse was already gone. He scowled. She wasn't going to be able to avoid him forever and she was only making things more awkward.

"Let's walk and talk," he said, turning his attention back to Maria. "What's going on, Nurse Heikkinen?"

"Are you on your way to sickbay?" she asked.

"I was going to go change first and I recommend you do the same. The inbriefing is still scheduled for 1100 hours though, so make it quick."

"Sure thing, doctor," she grinned. "Did we ever end up getting a new head nurse?"

"Yeah, yesterday," he grumbled. "I swear molasses moves faster than personnel resources."

"What's she like? Or he? Have you met this person?"

 _Boy had he ever_. He rubbed his chin and replied, "Briefly. Her name's Christine Chapel. She seems-"

He was interrupted by Maria's squeal. "Are you serious? That's awsome! She was my senior mentor during my first year at the Academy."

Leonard swallowed hard. "Oh well- that's… _great_. I'm sure you'll have a lot to talk about."

"I _know_. I can't wait to catch up and it'll be so nice to have a familiar face in sickbay. I can promise you, you're just going to _love_ Christine," Maria beamed. "Anyway, my quarters are down this way. I'll see you at 1100, doctor."

His scowl deepened. He hadn't anticipated this exact complication. He got along well with Maria Heikkinen, but what if Christine told her all about their wild romp? The last thing he needed was for divisions to start forming in his sickbay. Maybe he was kidding himself by thinking he could find a way to work things out with her. He liked Christine a lot, but she didn't seem to be interested in him.

Leonard lost himself in his thoughts as he packed himself into an overcrowded turbolift and made his way to Deck 9. He trudged along the corridor and turned left into Section 2, and as he turned into Subsection F, he heard a familiar voice.

"Authorization _Chapel. Alpha. Two_." Christine's voice was slow, deliberate, and agitated.

The door didn't seem to be responding to her command and Leonard immediately knew why. She was trying to access _his_ quarters. "Hello, Nurse Chapel."

Her expression was unrecognizable. " _Dr. McCoy_."

"Can I ask why you're trying to get into my quarters?" he murmured, stuffing his hands in his pockets and doing his absolute best to keep his tone completely free of innuendo.

"These are _my_ quarters, according to the information the personnel officer sent out," she argued, waving her PADD in his face.

"No, 3F 127 has always been my room," he said. He took several steps forward and said, "Authorization McCoy Gamma Two."

The pneumatic door sprung open and Leonard shot her a knowing glance. The look on her face grew darker.

"But this is where I was assigned," she insisted, offering him the PADD. "This was where I had my stuff sent."

He glanced at the information and sure enough, her quarters assignment read, 9 - 2 - 3F - 127. He sighed. "It's probably just a mix-up. A lot of the senior medical staff has quarters down this way."

He stepped across the threshold and looked back at her. She remained frozen in place, arms crossed and eyes wide.

"Would you like to come in, Nurse Chapel? You know, since your things are in here? Maybe we could even talk while we're at it, instead of you staring at me like you just found a snake in your boot."

She sighed and breezed through the doorway without uncrossing her arms. Leonard gazed around the room, noting the layout was identical to the last incarnation of the _Enterprise_. Home sweet home.

"I'll just get my things and be gone," Christine huffed, strolling over to the transporter drop site in the corner.

Home sweet home was right, because no home of Leonard McCoy could be complete without a woman wanting to pack her things and leave it. He sighed. "Look, can we talk please?"

She rested her hand on a black trunk Leonard didn't recognize, body stiff and facing the wall. "Leonard- Dr. McCoy, I'm really-"

She was interrupted when the intercom cracked to life. " _This is Captain James Kirk. Most of you know me, some of you don't, but I look forward to getting to know each and every one of you in the coming weeks. I think of Enterprise more as a family than a crew, and I for one am glad to welcome our newcomers into the fold."_

"Nurse Chapel, I think I know why you took off yesterday," Leonard blurted.

Her face paled and she opened her mouth to speak but was interrupted once again by the captain.

" _That being said, I know we were hoping to get off to an easy start and chart the Necro Cloud, but unfortunately that's going to have to take a backseat for now. Starfleet has ordered us to Sector 3641 to assist in relief efforts following a series of ion storms that have devastated the recently reterraformed Suliban home world. We're setting a course and we'll arrive in three days._ "

"Dr. McCoy, I really think-" A third interruption derailed her words. Leonard noticed a red flush creeping across her face as she bit the inside of her cheek in frustration.

 _"I need all department chiefs in the ready room at 1100 hours for a mission brief. Welcome back, everyone. Kirk out_."

They both hesitated for several seconds, waiting for more interruptions that never came. Then they had the misfortune to break the silence at the same time.

"Leonard, I-"

"Look, Christine-"

They paused, staring at each other. Leonard felt glad to be back on a first name basis. She was at least looking at him, even if she wasn't looking him in the eye.

"I don't want things to be weird between us," he announced.

"Me either," she admitted. "Which is why I think we should just forget what happened."

"Which part?" he asked, hoping she wasn't implying what he thought she was.

"We had a good night together and I really like you, but I'm not in a very good place at the moment," she mumbled. "Between my work life and my personal life, I feel like I only have enough sanity to hold one together right now."

"Do you really think that's going to work? Pretending like it never happened?" Leonard asked.

"It's going to have to."

A little crack formed somewhere deep within him and it occurred to him just how much he really liked her. She was rejecting him, and it _hurt_. Suddenly he heard the comm by the door chirp and he closed his eyes in frustration.

"You should probably answer that," she mumbled. "I'll get my stuff and get out of your hair."

"Is there any way I can make you change your mind?" he pleaded, holding his hand above the comm to wait for her response.

His question seemed to surprise her; she looked away in thought. The comm chirped again. Leonard gritted his teeth and answered, "McCoy here."

" _Hey Bones, it's me. I know you said you wanted to talk and I need to go over the requisition for this mission's medical supplies with you before we leave Yorktown."_

Leonard tried to formulate a response in his head but could see Christine in his periphery starting to scramble to collect her things. "Uh- uh, _sure_. Can you give me twenty minutes to get dressed and get down to sickbay?"

" _I'm actually right by your quarters. I'll be there in less than a minute_."

Leonard could see Christine's movements reaching a frenzied pace as she threw her personal bags onto the wheeled med kit and hustled toward the door.

" _No_ ," Leonard barked. "I'm getting dressed."

" _Oh come on, Bones. We were roommates at the Academy. I've seen you change clothes before_. _I promise I won't look, you prude_."

Christine's hand snaked her way around his arm to the control panel to open the door. Leonard disengaged the comm and said, "Christine, please-"

"I can't," she hissed. "It's complicated. It's really a lot more complicated than you know."

"Look, I know about you and Jim – Captain Kirk," he said quietly, glancing up and down the relatively quiet corridor.

Her jaw twitched and her eyes grew wide. "He _told_ you?"

"Yesterday," he confessed. "But like you said, it's _complicated_. He's my best friend."

Christine's face contorted into an expression of abject shock. "I have to go."

She wheeled around and marched down the corridor to the nearest turbolift. She had only taken a few steps when Leonard snapped to his senses and went after her. "Do you _always_ run away from your problems?" he snapped.

Her face darkened. "You don't know anything _about_ me," she spat.

"I know more than you think," he retorted. He'd read her medical file; he knew a lot about Christine, right down to how much she weighed at birth.

"Only because that arrogant _prick_ probably told you all about it," she seethed. Leonard could see tears forming in her eyes and realized this was turning into a disaster.

"That's not what I meant."

Two crewmen were coming along the corridor and Leonard wasn't in the mood to cause a scene. People liked to gossip enough as it already was. He nodded to the two young men as Christine resumed her trek to the turbolift. _What a damn mess_.

He watched her walk out of view along the gently curved corridor and no sooner was she out of sight than Leonard heard the familiar voice of the captain behind him. "How's it going, Bones? I thought you said you were going to change?"

He pivoted on his heel to see Jim had already donned his command gold duty uniform. Leonard frowned and stalked into his quarters, his friend right on his heels.

"I know we could discuss this at the mission brief in thirty minutes, but I want to give the Yorktown crews a heads up on last minute requests since they're loading the relief supplies now," Jim explained, offering him a data PADD. Leonard took it and set it down on the bed to read over it as he started unbuttoning his uniform coat.

"I'd prefer artithrazine over hydronailin; Suliban biochemistry can be tricky. Other than that, it looks fine to me," Leonard mumbled, walking toward the stack of bags in the corner to locate a duty uniform.

Jim picked up the PADD and dictated a few things and he heard the familiar _ping_ of a message being sent. "Off to save the Suliban. Right back into the fire, huh Bones?"

"You have no idea," Leonard replied, kicking off his dress shoes while he searched for his work boots.

"So what did you want to talk about earlier?" Jim asked. "I've got a few minutes."

"It's about Christine Chapel," Leonard replied, his voice lowering to something resembling a growl.

"Yeah, I'm sorry I pawned her off on you at the commissioning ceremony," Jim interrupted. "I just hadn't seen her in so long and running into her caught me off guard. I forgot how pretty she was."

"Jim, the thing is-"

"You don't want to be involved in patching up my mistakes," Jim interrupted. "I _know_. You've told me a hundred times. We went through this with Carol."

"Jim, it's not _that_ ," Bones insisted, pulling a black undershirt over his head and fumbling with the long sleeves.

"She's easily the best woman I ever dated, aside from Carol of course and well... you know how complicated _that_ turned out to be," Jim mused. "I stayed up last night thinking about Christine, and I can't imagine she'd ever want anything to do with me again and I know I'm her commanding officer now, but-"

"Jim, I slept with her," Leonard announced, pulling his head through his blue uniform shirt. He stared at his best friend, watching the features of his face cycle through the five stages of grief in no particular order for several seconds before landing on anger.

"How could you do this to me?" Jim fumed.

" _You_? How could _I_ do this to _you_?" Leonard rebutted, suddenly feeling very angry in return.

"I would never do that to you! You _knew_ I dated her-"

" _No I didn't_ ," Leonard shot back. "Not at the time. I met her at that stupid speed dating you signed me up for. And I don't know if you realize this, but not everything is about _you_. What about _her_?"

Jim stepped back and slumped on the edge of the bed. "So are you two… you know?"

" _No_ ," Leonard snapped. "I like her a whole hell of a lot, but I get the sense she wants nothing to do with me because of _you_."

Jim furrowed his brow, sighed heavily, and stared at the floor. Leonard did the same, electing for a seat on one of his trunks. "Look Jim, you're my best friend and I don't want to throw that away for a woman I barely know."

Jim nodded and replied, "And because you're my best friend, I don't want to stand in your way. I'm serious, Bones. I liked Christine too but I had my chance. I signed you up for speed dating as a joke, but I can tell you're lonely. And Christine is a good person. You both deserve to be happy."

"Well, that's awfully big of you, but like I said, I don't think she's interested anymore."

"Do you want me to talk to her?"

Leonard gave him a pointed look. "I think you've done enough."

"You know, sometimes I think I love being out in deep space because it allows me to run away from all the people I hurt," Jim admitted. "I really was an ass."

"Yes you were," Leonard agreed with a laugh.

"Thanks for being honest with me, I guess," Jim shrugged. "And I'm sorry about Christine."

"Yeah, me too."

"You're going to have to work with her everyday; don't you think that'll be weird?"

"What do _you_ think?" Leonard sneered.

"Point taken," his friend admitted, springing to his feet. "Let's talk more later, but for now, I need to go find Spock before the mission brief."

As he was leaving the room he turned and said, "And Bones, I really do mean it. I hope things can work out between you and Christine. Don't feel like you can't date her just because… you know."

"Yeah thanks," Leonard grumbled. "Besides, if I wasn't allowed to date women you've been with, that would leave me with only Klingons and men."

Jim shot him a dirty look and then smiled. "You _wound_ me."

"Yeah, well, I'll see you at the brief," Leonard replied. They walked together into the hallway and immediately turned in opposite directions.

Leonard suddenly remembered the sickbay inbriefing for his new medical staff was scheduled for 1100 hours – the same time as the captain's mission brief. He sent a message to Dr. M'Benga asking him to give the new personnel a tour of sickbay until he could get back and start tweaking the shift assignments and meet the new arrivals for himself.

Leonard waited outside the turbolift. He wanted to work things out with Christine and now that he'd settled things with Jim, maybe when life quieted down he could convince her to give things a shot. Or at least maybe not treat him like a mangy dog. He would settle for the latter but felt hopeful for the former.

Then the turbolift doors flew open and there she was. She balked when she saw him but quickly collected herself and stormed past him. He pursed his lips and was about to say something, but she moved surprisingly fast for someone carrying so much baggage.

 _Maybe fixing things with Christine would take longer than he thought_.


	8. The Art of Pretending

Why had she not pushed harder for a new assignment? Why had she not begged? Why had she not whipped up some tears? She scowled. Tears were for manipulators and little girls.

The one thing she knew was that she couldn't stay on board _Enterprise-A_. She _wouldn't_. She took several deep breaths and flopped down on the edge of the firm mattress.

She stared at the trunks and bags in the middle of her new room assignment – room 9 – 2 – 3F – 126, right next door to Leonard. The personnel officer had apologized profusely for his mistake in assigning them to the same quarters, and then apologized again when he informed her there were no other senior officers' quarters available other than the ones that happened to share a wall with Leonard McCoy's room.

She closed her eyes and grimaced. Leonard liked her; that much was obvious. When she didn't allow her thoughts to get in the way, she knew she liked him too. It would just never work. Her career had to come before men; after Jim and Roger, she'd made a promise to herself. Starfleet would always be there, but the opposite sex came and went as they pleased.

Even if she _were_ willing to ignore her cardinal rule about not dating men in Starfleet, she would have to bend it pretty hard to date the Chief Medical Officer of a starship where she was also the Chief Nurse. Not to mention that business with James Kirk – _her_ ex-boyfriend and _his_ best friend. She shuddered.

There was almost nothing that could convince her that she wouldn't spend the next eighteen months as the subject of fierce and probing gossip. It was bad enough being Christine the victim after the _Constellation_ incident, and now she was going to be Christine who slept with the Captain and two-timed him for the CMO.

Any professional achievement would immediately be embroiled in suspicion about favoritism and sleeping with the boss. She was sure she wouldn't even be able to take a day off without someone whispering a joke about the things she must have done to "get her way." She _hated_ starship rumor mills and politics, and now she was set to take center stage forever.

She sniffed away the beginnings of frustrated tears and pulled at the buttons of her dress uniform. She was due in sickbay in about five minutes, and the last thing she wanted was to be late. She donned her blue medical smock, checked her hair in the mirror by the door, fastened her communicator to her belt, and trotted down the hallway. She tapped her foot as she waited for the turbolift to take her to sickbay on Deck 5, but when the door swung open, she fought the urge to turn and run.

There were two people inside, the handsome Vulcan she'd encountered earlier and _him_. James Tiberius Kirk: captain of the starship _Enterprise_ , though it was technically more correct to say _Enterprise-A_ , given he'd destroyed the last ship he commanded. He seemed just as surprised to see _her_ as she was to see him.

"Lieutenant Chapel?" Commander Spock asked, pressing a button on the wall to hold the door. "Were you waiting to board the turbolift?"

She could feel the heat rising in her cheeks. She'd been standing there staring at them for several seconds with her mouth hanging open. Now not only had she slept with the captain and the CMO, the first officer probably thought she was a complete idiot too. _Great_.

"Aye, sir," she mumbled, stepping inside between the two men.

The lift shot upward and shuddered a split second later, putting the three of them off-balance. Christine lurched forward but felt a strong hand grab her bicep and steady her. _Jim's_ hand.

He pulled it back quickly and coughed, asking, "What's going on, Spock? Why have we stopped?"

"The engineers at Yorktown logged several malfunctions during the calibration of the forward turbolifts," the first officer explained.

"Including stoppages?"

"Yes, Captain."

"Why didn't they note these malfunctions in the final report?"

Christine started to involuntarily tune them out. The turbolift had stopped. They weren't moving. They were _trapped_.

She took a deep breath and tried to remain calm, but the walls seemed to be drawing closer. How could the turbolift be growing smaller? She hadn't been very comfortable in small, confined spaces ever since her experience in Engineering Storage Locker 2 aboard the _Constellation_ , but she'd always managed to handle short stints in turbolifts and bioscanners. She closed her eyes and swallowed a scream.

Her breaths grew shallower and she tried to maintain her outward composure, but she could tell from the curious look on the captain's face that she was failing miserably. "Nurse Chapel?"

His mouth was moving but the words coming out of it sounded strange. She took a step back and bumped into Commander Spock, who uttered another string of unintelligible comments. She tried to tell him she would be ok if she could just get some fresh air, but her explanation came out as a garbled shriek.

She backed into a corner, sweaty and shaking. Her ragged breathing continued and black spots started to form in her field of vision. _Why couldn't she pull it together_?

They watched as she slid down the wall to sit on the floor and continued to choke on her fear. The commander took a step toward her, and then she couldn't say exactly what happened next. She tried to gently push him away and insist she would be all right, but her hand caught on something and reality quickly faded to black.

She awoke to a splitting headache and people talking over her. The first voice was deep and rich and the second was female and high-pitched. When she finally dared herself to open her eyes, she wished she hadn't. The bright overhead light of the biobed amplified her headache to an unbearable degree.

"Christine Chapel?" the male voice asked.

"Yes?" She opened her eyes a fraction of a millimeter to see a large man with a dark complexion and smiling eyes.

"I'm Dr. Joseph M'Benga," he added, offering a hand to her. "I bet your head hurts."

"Yeah," she croaked.

"A Vulcan nerve pinch," he explained. "Very effective, but there are always lingering side effects."

A Vulcan _what_? _What had happened_? The lights dimmed and she opened her eyes and tried to sit up and collect her bearings. "Take it easy, Christine."

The voice was a woman's, sharp and memorable. She opened one eye a little wider and saw the round, familiar face of Maria Heikkinen. She couldn't help the smile that inched across her lips. She had been Maria's mentor at the Academy during the young Finnish woman's first year, and seeing her was a breath of fresh air.

Christine had been older than most of the nursing cadets – she'd finished her bachelors before joining Starfleet and had completed the accelerated three-year program for recruits with critical skills. Christine had been twenty-five and Maria had been seventeen when they first met, and though she'd wondered what they could possibly have in common, they'd become fast friends during her final year at the Academy.

"Maria?"

"That's my name," the young woman replied. "It's so good to see you, Christine. Or I should say Nurse Chapel? I can't believe you made Head Nurse. Actually, I _can_. You deserve it."

She _deserved_ it. She didn't _feel_ like she deserved anything, not after… oh no.

Christine's heart sank as reality trickled back into her consciousness. She'd had a panic attack in a turbolift with the captain and the first officer and must have fainted. Oh _God_.

Dr. M'Benga returned with a hypospray and a clear PADD, which she presumed was her medical record. "No allergies to hydrocortiline?"

"No," she squeaked.

He delivered a shot of the analgesic into her neck and her headache began to subside almost immediately. She rubbed her temples with her right hand, noticing her first three fingernails were tinged with a dark, dirty substance.

"Has this ever happened before?" Dr. M'Benga asked.

"What?"

"Anxiety issues?" the doctor explained.

"No," she breathed. "Not like this."

"You've been under the care of a psychiatrist for several weeks," he said, glancing at the PADD in his hand.

Her chin quivered. Christine looked over at Maria, whose face bore the most reassuring expression she'd ever seen. "I uh- I…"

Her voice started to crack and she bit her lip to steady her thoughts. Crying wasn't going to make this better, but she wondered how it could possibly get any worse. No one on this ship would ever respect her again.

"Maybe you could give us a minute, doctor?" Maria asked, gazing at M'Benga.

"Of course," he agreed, gently touching Christine's shoulder.

He activated the privacy shield on his way out, leaving the two women in the dimly lit room. Christine couldn't bring herself to look at her former protégé. What must Maria think of her?

"I heard about the stuff that happened on the _Constellation_ ," Maria finally said. "I'm so sorry."

She wanted to leap from the bed and run some place where she could be alone, but the moment the first tear slid down her cheek, she became paralyzed by powerful emotions. She hadn't really cried since everything had happened, aside from her regrettable drunken sob session with Leonard two nights ago. But something had cracked and the floodgates were open, and she was afraid they were never going to close again.

She wailed uncontrollably, stopping several times to catch her breath and wipe the mucous from her nose and chin. Maria hugged her and cried too, and soon words started falling from Christine's mouth about everything that had happened. The story of the _Constellation_ , all her dead friends, and the subsequent nightmares and guilt erupted from psyche and escaped through her mouth, and when she was done, she was a snotty, hiccupping mess.

She felt nauseated when Maria explained that she hadn't fainted in the turbolift: the first officer had used some kind of Vulcan martial arts to sedate her because she'd started to become hysterical. "I don't know how you'll ever respect me again."

"Stop it! Stop it right now!" Maria barked, sniffing back her own tears. "No one's invincible, Christine. After Altamid, I've developed a fear of the dark. How silly is that?"

They both choked out a laugh a cried a few more weak tears.

"What a mess this is," Christine mused.

"Why did you take another deep space assignment?" Maria asked. "You could use a break from all this."

"I didn't really get much of a choice," she explained. "Commander Zograf told me I needed a head nurse position and made it seem like it was an _honor_ to be on _Enterprise_."

"He sounds like an ass."

Christine laughed. "He _was_. The kind of guy who probably thinks Yorktown is a really dangerous assignment."

"Have you been to counseling?"

"Of _course_ ," she sighed bitterly. "I did all the mandatory sessions and did the two week course of neural reconfiguration. I thought I was _fine_. I told myself I was lucky to be alive and should get on with my life."

"We lost more than a hundred people at Altamid," Maria admitted. "I know it's not the whole crew or anything, but it was still really hard on people. The ones who stayed on – you can see they still have a lot of healing to do. You'll fit right in here. We're all just a bunch of people trying to keep on keeping on, to borrow one of your American expressions."

"I don't think I can stay," Christine explained, considering the enormity of the emotional and situational disaster she was wading through.

"I really hope you decide to stick with us," Maria said. "You're a good nurse, Christine, and I wouldn't be where I am today without you."

She started to get choked up by her friend's confession and they hugged again. "Thanks, but I think the crew probably deserves a head nurse who isn't going to lose her mind in a sticky turbolift."

"They also deserve a nurse as seasoned as you are," Maria countered. "Besides, Dr. McCoy is an accomplished psychologist. I'm sure he'd be happy to schedule as much time as you need-"

"I _can't_ ," she interrupted, feeling her pulse quicken at the sound of his name.

"But why?"

Christine chewed her lip and considered just putting it all out there – her former relationship with the captain and her drunken one-night stand with the CMO – but before she could answer, there he was, standing in the doorway and watching her carefully.

The privacy shield was still active so he couldn't hear their conversation, but his presence made the words stick to the inside of her mouth. His face was hard to read. Was he disappointed? Concerned? Maria turned her head to see what she was looking at and smiled. "Speak of the devil."

She and Maria looked _awful_. Their faces were red and puffy from crying, and Maria's mascara and long ago rained off her cheeks. Christine knew she didn't look much better and wondered if it was possible to die of shame. She clamped her eyes shut and counted to five, and when she reopened her eyes, he was gone.

Maria excused herself to go wash her face and told her she would bring back a glass of water and a wet washcloth, and on her way out, Dr. M'Benga returned. Christine inhaled a staggering sigh and tried to force her mouth into a smile. She was sure she probably looked more deranged than happy.

"Hello again, Doctor."

"Nurse Chapel," he replied, bowing his head. He clutched a PADD in his hands and took a seat by the biobed.

"I read over your medical history and couldn't find any mention of anxiety or claustrophobia. Then I read over your personnel file, I think I have a clearer picture of what's going on. This isn't generalized anxiety, is it?"

"No, probably not," she sniffed.

"The doctors at Yorktown didn't actually diagnose you with post traumatic stress, but I get the feeling they were eager to get you out the door."

She scoffed. Dr. M'Benga was more right than he knew – the doctors at Yorktown probably wanted her in their offices as much as she wanted to be there, which was not at all. It happened to transient patients all the time – doctors were eager to put a patch on the problem and move them onto someone who would be able to provide more dedicated care. Since she had been pending an assignment and wasn't actually stationed at Yorktown, they probably didn't want to get too invested in her treatment because she would just be gone by the time another starship showed up to take her away, and that was exactly what had happened.

"I won't pretend like I know _exactly_ what you're going through, but I hope you don't mind me telling you, I still get a little jumpy when I hear loud noises."

"Why?" she asked.

"Five years ago, I was nearly killed when Romulans attacked the ship at the Battle of Vulcan. A huge disruptor blast blew out half of sickbay and ruptured my ear drums and left me with third degree burns over forty percent of my body."

"Oh."

"There's no shame in being human or having emotionally fragile moments," he added. "You're not broken, you know."

"But I'm sure everyone knows what happened by now," she groaned.

"No, actually. I believe the only people who are aware of the situation are the captain, the first officer, myself, and Dr. McCoy. As you know, neither myself nor Dr. McCoy care to violate patient privilege, and I can assure you that both the captain and first officer are quite discreet about these things."

Christine frowned. She'd also told Maria, but she knew Maria wouldn't tell a soul. Was it possible she could keep this secret? She sighed. What did it matter if the last people she wanted knowing about it already did?

She hated the fact that Leonard – correction, _Dr. McCoy_ – knew about her breakdown, but he was the CMO. He _had_ to be informed whenever there was a question of whether a crewmember might not be fit for duty. Same with the captain. _Oh no_.

"Are you going to relieve me of duty?" she asked.

"Do you want me to?"

"I… no. _No_. I'm a nurse; I like to think I'm actually pretty good at it." She felt herself getting misty-eyed again but managed to keep control.

"That's what I hear, and I'm looking forward to working with you," he replied.

"Thank you."

"I would like to put on you on quarters for the rest of the day though, to let you take a breather and get a fresh start tomorrow. Any objections?"

She wanted to argue but she had to admit, the idea sounded pretty appealing. "I guess that's fine."

"I also want to prescribe a weekly injection of proazium for the post traumatic stress and associated claustrophobia," he added.

She clenched her jaw. Proazium was an emotional suppressant that worked wonders in treating people with profound anxiety and phobias. She knew exactly why he was recommending it – she wouldn't have batted an eye if the patient had been anyone else – but she felt a little annoyed that she had to turn to medicine to get her life under control.

How strange that she'd spent much of her career fighting stigmas surrounding all forms of mental illness but she was reluctant to admit she had lingering anxiety and post traumatic stress and needed medication. What an example she was setting; she felt like a hypocrite.

"Ok," she agreed.

"That was easy," he said, brandishing a hypospray to give her an injection of proazium. "I'd also like to refer you to Dr. McCoy. He's not only the CMO, but he's the resident psychologist."

" _No_." Her response was swift and brutal to the point of almost being embarrassing, but on this she was resolved. Leonard McCoy wasn't the solution to her problems: quite the opposite.

"It's my recommendation," he shrugged. "I can't make you talk to him, but he's a very skilled physician and a personal friend. Have you met him?"

Were she anyone else other than the woman who'd been engaged in drunken sex with the man in question less than forty-eight hours ago, the irony of M'Benga's question would have reduced her to giggling tears. "Yes. Briefly."

Maria came back with the water and washcloth and put an end to the awkward line of questioning. Christine sponged her face, which felt greasy, scummy, and warm from her emotional acrobatics and downed the glass of water in several large gulps. She was both surprised and delighted to learn the new biobed models had site-to-site transport capabilities, and several minutes later she was returned to her quarters with instructions to report for her first official shift at 0800 the following morning.

She slumped down on the bed and prepared to wallow in her unpacked bags and self-pity, but found herself feeling oddly numb to her problems. The proazium seemed to be working.

She set herself to hanging her uniforms in the closet and took time to marvel at the size of her new quarters – being a senior officer had benefits she'd never thought about before – but the size of her room made her realize just how little she owned. It was sad, really.

Just as she finished unpacking her toiletries, the door buzzed. She gritted her teeth and considered the odds. As far as she was aware, she only knew five people aboard this ship and she wasn't jumping for joy at the thought of greeting most of them.

The pneumatic door slid open to reveal a man tied for last place on the list of people Christine most wanted to see. _Captain James Kirk_.

"Nurse Chapel," he said. "I'm not disturbing you, am I?"

"No." Her voice sounded hollow and unfeeling. Rather than being confronted by the urge to flee, she felt curiously accepting of the situation. Maybe it was the proazium, or maybe it was the result of having a terrible day and no longer caring how much worse it got.

"Do you mind if I come in so we can talk?"

Sure, she minded, but she didn't really see how she could refuse. She shuffled out of the way and motioned for him to come inside.

The moment the door closed, he declared, "I was really worried about you, you know, after the turbolift."

She bit her lip and nodded. "I'm _so_ sorry, captain. I just… I haven't been myself lately."

"You don't have to apologize, Chris- Nurse Chapel. God, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

She crossed her arms and felt more annoying tears threatening to emerge. She wasn't really angry – she was _confused_.

"Why are _you_ sorry?" she said, her voice snapping more than she intended. "I'm the one that freaked out on the turbolift. I don't even-"

"Spock's fine. What happened in the turbolift is already forgotten," he interrupted. "I don't mean to cut you off, but I really hope you can understand just how sorry I am – for what I did at the Academy, for what happened to the _Constellation_ , for all of it. Everything."

She chewed the tip of her tongue and nodded. "So you know? About the _Constellation_?"

"Yeah, Dr. McCoy told me about your personnel file and I had a look at it."

"I'm still fit for duty," she rebutted.

"That's what Dr. M'Benga says," he agreed. "He says you're coming back to work tomorrow at 0800 hours, but I'm ready to offer you as much time as you need to get yourself better."

"I need you to know I can still do my job," she snapped, nearly growling.

"I'm not questioning your abilities or your competence," he explained, holding up his hands. "I just want you to be at your best when you come to work."

She sighed and nodded, wondering if the conversation was as awkward for him as it was for her. Being pitied was the _worst_. She snuck a look at his face and was momentarily transported back to her senior year at the Academy. He'd aged a little, but he was still as handsome as ever.

"I didn't want this assignment," she explained.

"I… I guess I can understand why," he admitted. "And I don't blame you."

"I don't see how things will ever be normal for me here."

He rubbed his hands through his hair and bobbed his head. She was struck by a new idea. "Commander Zograf, the personnel resources officer back on Yorktown, he refused to change my assignment. But you're the captain of this ship – _you_ could recommend my reassignment."

He dropped his hands and stared at her and she wondered if she'd overreached. "I'm not asking for some special, cushy posting on the French Riviera or anything, but if I could find another nurse willing and able to fill in, would you at least consider it?"

"I'll consider it, but only if you meet me halfway," he finally said.

"How so?"

"Give us three months," he said. "Let me make up for the things I did and prove to you _Enterprise_ is a great ship to be on. Don't cheat the crew out of a great nurse because I was an ass. I promise you, I will always be fair and impartial as your commanding officer."

She held her breath and narrowed her eyes. "It's more complicated than all that."

He shuffled his feet. "Whatever you think is too complicated, I want you to know it's probably not as bad as you think. _Enterprise_ is just like any starship – we have our gossip and disagreements, but we all take turns. Hell, last year someone started a rumor that I was a youth yodeling champion. That one still won't die. Someone got me a pair of lederhosen as a gag gift at the last holiday party."

She snorted a laugh and a crooked grin streaked across his face. _God, he had a killer smile, even when he wasn't trying._

"But I think you'll find people here are pretty open-minded and non-judgmental, but you have to give us a chance and find that out for yourself."

She crossed her arms and nodded. "Ok, captain. Three months."

"Yeah?"

"Aye, sir."

"You can call me Jim in private, but only if you want. I'm not big on formality most of the time."

"If it's ok with you, I'd prefer it if you called me Nurse Chapel," she said softly. "Or Lieutenant Chapel. At least for now."

His face fell but he recovered quickly. "Sure thing, Nurse Chapel. Anyway, I gotta get back to the bridge, but I just wanted to make sure you were doing ok. Uh, I'll leave you to unpack."

"Thank you, Captain."

The moment the door closed behind him, she leaned against the wall and sighed. She'd had many worse days than this one, but she still felt so damn tired.


	9. Back at It

Leonard listened as the other department heads droned on about their roles during the mission. Lieutenant Uhura would keep communications open, Commander Scott would be standing by with transporters and so on. It was odd that the first officer wasn't present, but it wasn't like the fastidious Vulcan to skip out on a mission brief, so Leonard figured wherever he was, it was important.

They'd done lots of missions together over the years and this one was pretty routine – beam down to the surface and deliver medical supplies and assistance. It was also routine in that it came with some serious complications.

The Suliban home world had become uninhabitable due to seismic activity and atmospheric depletion more than three centuries ago, and all modern Suliban descended from the nomads who had fled. Eventually scientists discovered a method of stabilizing the planet's core and stripping away the excess carbon dioxide and methane from the atmosphere, and the Suliban started trickling back home.

It was still very much a frontier civilization and the social and political climate was a powder keg. The Suliban had been through an incredible ordeal as a species and had become _very_ culturally diverse due to assimilation into a wide number of neighboring cultures over the past 300 years. The end result was that their great homecoming wasn't as rosy as it could have been. In less than sixty years, the planet had experienced five military coups, three civil wars, and one world war.

In the past decade they'd wisely asked for the Federation's help in mediating the conflict rather than continue down the path of self-destruction, and things seemed to be progressing, even if the situation was tenuous. Then a major earthquake two weeks ago had devastated the Southern continent, and now a series of particularly violent ion storms from a nearby nebula had stripped away much of the atmosphere, putting the entire population of 200,000 Suliban at risk.

He heard the rush of the door and saw Spock slipping into the back of the ready room. Everyone's eyes darted in his direction. Apparently Leonard wasn't the only one who thought it was weird that the strict Vulcan would miss such an important briefing.

"As I was saying," said Lieutenant Palmer, the ship's xenoanthropoligist, "about half of the population has been evacuated to the Xarantine home world, but there are many Suliban who are refusing to leave."

"And what can we expect from the people?" Captain Kirk asked.

"As has already been said several times, the Suliban are a very diverse population," Lieutenant Palmer explained. "Since we're going to the Southern continent to help the earthquake survivors, most of my brief has been targeted to populations found in this region, though I can give you a more comprehensive report by tomorrow, if-"

"That's not necessary, lieutenant," the captain interrupted. "This was all very short notice and you're doing great. Just give us the pertinent information."

"Right," Palmer said, blushing. "Well, many of the Suliban in the Southern region are descendants of what was formerly known as the Suliban Cabal, which was an interstellar terrorist organization active in the middle of the previous century. The people we're going to treat are _not_ terrorists and haven't been for generations according to all reliable reports, but there still seems to be a lot of bad blood between them and the rest of the Suliban."

"Have they agreed to be evacuated?" Kirk asked.

"No, and I have the feeling they would refuse all offers of evacuation," Palmer added. "They're very patriotic and have formed strong ties to their planet. They've spent more than a century trying to re-assimilate back into Suliban society, and I don't think they're going to be willing to give it up their homes so easily. On a similar note, they tend to be mistrustful of government, particularly their own, because twelve years ago the Suliban parliament voted to place them in internment camps following several terrorist incidents. There were some riots and the internment camps never actually stood up, but it's still a pretty sensitive issue for them."

"Thank you, lieutenant," Kirk said.

"There's one more thing, sir," Palmer said, rising on her toes. "Many members of the Suliban Cabal underwent genetic enhancements, which I would _think_ are probably still present in their descendants and might complicate their medical treatment."

"You're right," Leonard interjected. "And I'm aware of the situation. I intend to do some research and brief the medical staff, but thank you for your attention to detail."

Lieutenant Palmer took her seat and Lieutenant Halax, the cultural affairs strategist, rose to his feet to his feet to give his recommendations for interacting with the Suliban populace.

"As Lieutenant Palmer explained, these people are wary of government, so I wouldn't advise mentioning Starfleet or the Federation when speaking with them, unless directly asked. We want to put forth the idea we're here as humanitarians first, not as a government entity in any kind of way. Furthermore, they tend to be very sensitive about every aspect of their ancestors' involvement with the Cabal, so I would avoid talking about genetic enhancements, terrorism, and time travel…"

He spoke for another hour and Leonard took copious notes. The Denobulan was pretty long-winded, but Leonard appreciated the advice – he could be a better doctor if he wasn't offending his patients. When the brief was finally over, they rose to their feet out of respect as the captain departed first, and then all trailed out of the situation room.

He wandered into the corridor, his brain littered with all kinds of facts about the Suliban Cabal and all kinds of emotions about Jim and Christine. He sighed, frustrated that his life could never seem to manage to be quiet and simple.

He saw Jim and Spock speaking quietly by the turbolift and wondered why they weren't heading toward the bridge with the rest of the bridge officers. The captain's face was dark and when he caught sight of Leonard, he motioned for him to join them.

"What's going on?" Leonard asked.

"Nurse Chapel had some kind of emotional breakdown," Jim said, shooting him a nervous look.

" _What_?"

"Me and Spock were in the turbolift with her right before the briefing and it stalled for a second and she… it looked like she had an anxiety attack. She damn near took Spock's eye out."

"The captain exaggerates my injury," Spock replied, glancing at Jim. Leonard peered closer and noticed the faintest green line trailing from Spock's forehead to his cheek, a lingering side effect from repair with a dermal regenerator that would probably be gone in a few hours.

"Dr. M'Benga is with her in sickbay, but I wanted to check in with you. I need to know if she's fit for duty."

Leonard glanced from Spock to the captain, feeling torn between his duty to protect Christine's secrets and his duty as a medical officer.

"Any chance I could speak with you in private, Jim?" he asked, giving Spock a regretful look.

The captain and first officer studied each other and Spock said, "I believe I am needed on the bridge, excuse me."

Leonard stepped into the turbolift with Jim and said, "Have you read her file?"

"No," Jim admitted. "I've been pretty busy the last couple of weeks. I mean, I obviously recognized her name when I saw her on the incoming personnel roster and that's when I came to talk to you, but I didn't think to actually _read_ her personnel file."

"She was one of only about a dozen survivors on the _Constellation_ ," Leonard explained.

Jim's expression fell. "I had no idea."

"Yeah, they all survived because a turn of bad luck ended up being a blessing in disguise. They were locked in an engineering locker for days while the rest of the crew died. If I were a betting man, I'd put money that incident probably aggravated some underlying claustrophobia, hence her reaction in the turbolift."

"I wonder why personnel resources put her on a new assignment so soon," Jim mused.

"Have you _met_ personnel resources? _Idiots_ , all of 'em."

The captain rolled his eyes and scoffed. "Do you think she's fit for duty?"

"I don't know," Leonard admitted. " _Probably_? She's not really that different from the rest of the original crew of _Enterprise_. She's been through hell and back, the only difference is she didn't have nearly as much time to get better as we did."

"Can you help her?"

Leonard sighed and rubbed his hands over his face. "Given the situation, I don't think she's going to _want_ my help. I don't think it would be _ethical_ for me to treat her."

The turbolift buzzed, indicating someone on another level was waiting to use it. Jim opened the door to step out and said, "Keep me posted."

Leonard moaned, leaned against the wall, and descended to sickbay on Deck 5. His staff greeting him when he arrived – many new faces but a lot of seasoned ones too – and he resisted the urge to fall immediately into the grind and decided to track down M'Benga. He found him sitting in the office designated for the deputy chief medical officer, his eyes scrolling quickly across a screen.

"Anything interesting?" Leonard asked.

"Never a dull moment. Two already from engineering with minor plasma burns," M'Benga sighed. "The new head nurse also suffered a panic attack in a turbolift and scratched Commander Spock's face. A relatively minor laceration."

Leonard shut the door to M'Benga's office and took a seat. "Does anyone else know what happened with Nurse Chapel?"

"Aside from myself, the captain, Commander Spock, Nurse Heikkinen, and now _you_ , I don't believe so. Nurse Heikkinen tended Commander Spock's injury, and they were both transported into the exam room from the turbolift, so I would say it's safe to say _no_ , no one else knows."

"Think we can try to keep it quiet?"

Dr. M'Benga shot him a wry look. "Come now, Leonard. I hate gossip as much as the next person."

"I know, Joe," he sighed, massaging his temples. "Where is she now?"

"Exam Room 3. Nurse Heikkinen is with her. Apparently they're old friends."

"How is she doing?"

"Commander Spock rendered her unconscious with a Vulcan nerve pinch, but she's awake and talking now."

Leonard groaned inwardly. _Damn Vulcan tricks_. But given Christine had clawed the man's face, he didn't suppose he could really blame Spock.

"There's no mention of a panic disorder or claustrophobia in her medical records," M'Benga continued. "It seems she was treated at Yorktown for mild psychological trauma and cleared for duty last week."

"It's a little more complicated than that," Bones admitted, and proceeded to explain Christine's unique situation.

"Post traumatic stress would explain a lot," M'Benga nodded. "She's already been through a two-week course of neural reconfiguration on Yorktown, but they didn't prescribe any continuing therapy or medication."

"We could try proazium," Leonard suggested.

"I was thinking the same thing, along with counseling," M'Benga agreed.

Leonard stiffened. He agreed with his deputy's assessment, but there was no way he should act as Christine's psychologist after sleeping with her. It had been hard enough disclosing the situation to Jim; he could _never_ tell M'Benga about that. M'Benga added, "Would you like to speak with her? You _are_ the ship's psychologist."

"Uh, well-"

" _Nurse Riley to Dr. McCoy_!" called a shrill voice on the comm by the wall.

He stopped midsentence and went to answer it. "McCoy here."

" _We just got a patient – twenty year old human male whose hand was crushed in a turbolift malfunction. He's stable and being prepped in surgical theater 1."_

"Acknowledged. McCoy out." He exhaled slowly. "Offer Nurse Chapel the proazium and counseling. I'm going to leave the fit for duty recommendation to you. I trust your judgment."

"Understood," M'Benga smiled. "Good to be back, huh?"

" _Yeah_ ," Leonard grumbled, rolling his eyes. "Another wonderful day in sickbay."

He left M'Benga's office and headed to surgery, but passed Exam Room 3 on his way there. He hesitated. Christine was propped up in a biobed, talking to Maria Heikkinen, her face red and swollen from what looked like a rather intense bout of crying. The privacy shield was up so he couldn't hear their discussion, but she looked so… _raw_.

He remembered the drunken game they'd played in her bed that had reduced her to tears and he wanted to kick himself for asking such a stupid question like, " _Which is worse: no one showing up to your funeral or your wedding_?"

Her eyes darted in his direction and he felt a strange emotion simmering in his gut. She was so beautiful, even when she wasn't. Nurse Heikkinen turned in her chair and Leonard could see she'd been crying too, but she also wore a welcoming smile. Leonard nodded and offered a little wave, but Christine had shut her eyes.

Why hadn't they turned on the two-way screen? Not a lot of the staff had a reason to come by the exam rooms but he figured they deserved a little more privacy. He hit the release for the two-way shield and the wall went white. They would still be able to see outside, but no one outside could look in.

Leonard made his way to surgery and discovered Crewman Dominguez, a new addition that had joined _Enterprise_ at Yorktown, with a very mangled right hand. He'd been fixing the malfunctioning turbolift and something went wrong and now Crewman Dominguez was missing roughly half his hand. _Great_.

He'd never really liked turbolifts much and now he liked them even less. Looking at Dominguez's injuries, he almost couldn't blame Christine for having a panic attack.

It took four hours to gently cut away the damaged tissue and cultivate the necessary stem cells to begin the process of re-growing the young man's hand. It was nearly suppertime when Leonard set his hand in the tissue regenerator for the first twelve-hour cycle. It would take that long just to regrow the bone; it would take an additional twenty-four hours to generate the tendons, muscles, and skin. In short, Dominguez wasn't going anywhere any time soon.

When Leonard was done, he trudged back to his office to work on the post-op report, but first he checked his messages. There were three messages from Commander Spock – the first asking for an inventory of the medical supplies by the start of Alpha shift in the morning, the second asking about the plan to rotate personnel through sickbay to receive the necessary immunizations for this mission, and the third asking for the daily status report.

There was one from Lieutenant Halax wanting to schedule time to meet with the medical staff to give them the same cultural training he'd sat through that afternoon, and another from Dr. M'Benga, indicating he'd already sent the daily status report to Spock and notes about the minor burn patients from earlier that morning. M'Benga had sent a separate message about Christine, indicating he'd prescribed the proazium and sent her back to her quarters until 0800 hours the following morning.

"Back into the fire," he sighed aloud, rushing to dictate his post-op report while it was still fresh in his mind.

He was halfway through when he got another message from Nurse Riley, the intake nurse on duty.

"What is it, Ensign?" he sighed.

" _We have five more coming in from engineering with plasma burns; none of them are severe, but one of the patients is Roylan_."

He clenched his jaw and nodded to himself. _Ensign Keenser_. Due to Keenser's caustic physiology, anyone who could be exposed to his saliva or blood was required to take certain precautionary measures. Rather than let one of the newer nurses tend to him, he figured it would be best to do it himself.

"Any chance you could tell Scotty to stop lighting his people on fire?" he grumbled.

" _I- um- who is Scotty_?"

Leonard took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He didn't know who Nurse Riley was, so it was safe to assume she was new. "Don't worry about it. Have one of the duty nurses treat the other four – I'll take care of Ensign Keenser. McCoy out."

He stood and grabbed his medical tricorder from the desk and nearly ran into Jim on his way out of the office.

"Hey Bones, got a minute?"

" _No_ ," Leonard growled, breezing past the captain into the narrow rear corridor of sickbay. "Your damn chief engineer must be practicing for the science fair down there."

"Do you have everything together for this mission?" Jim asked, following him.

"No," he admitted with a shrug. "Look, I've spent the last five hours trying to regrow a hand. Now I have five patients with plasma burns and a post-op that's not getting drafted, not to mention-"

"No one ever said you didn't stay busy," Jim interrupted with a weak smile.

Leonard sighed and stopped in his tracks. "What's up, Jim?"

The captain shuffled his feet and stared at the wall, and then Leonard understood. Jim didn't actually _need_ anything; he just wanted to talk. "Look, I'm uh, I'm kinda up to my elbows in suffering right now, but if I get done here before 2200 hours, I'll drop by your quarters. You owe me a drink anyway."

"I thought you quit drinking?" Jim laughed.

 _Oh right._ Leonard rolled his eyes and replied, "No one likes a quitter, right?"

"See you then, Bones," Jim said, giving him a smug look before turning down the corridor.

Only they never got the chance to have that drink; it was well past midnight when he made it back to his quarters. Ensign Keenser's burns had taken longer to treat than he expected and when he was done, he'd had to tend to Dominguez who'd woken from a violent nightmare and caused further injury to his mangled hand. He'd had to reinitiate the bone regeneration process, and when he was done with that, he'd had to stop and help one of the lab techs with the new chemical synthesizer.

Leonard hated to admit it, but between the two of them, it took nearly an hour to get it working. _Damn evolving technology_. What had been so wrong with the old model?

Several more hours of reports and planning for the upcoming mission and Leonard was officially exhausted. He hadn't slept well for the past couple days, but he figured that was unsurprising, all things considered.

He entered his quarters and flopped facedown on his bed, too tired to even take off his boots. He woke up what felt like a few minutes later, horrified to find out it was actually a few hours later and he was due in sickbay in twenty minutes. He quickly showered and shaved, trying to ignore the persistent hunger pains grinding away in his belly. When was the last time he'd eaten? Yesterday? Maybe?He left his quarters precisely at 0755 hours and was stunned to see Christine leaving the room adjacent to his.

"Good morning, doctor," she said, not making eye contact.

"Nurse Chapel." She looked the picture of immaculate professionalism – her hair was pulled into a neat and stylish bun, her blue uniform smock was perfectly pressed and she smelled of a very mild but pleasing scent that he couldn't quite put a finger on. Fresh laundry, maybe? A light spring rain? She was a world away from the wounded woman that had been sobbing so bitterly yesterday in Exam Room 3.

They rode together in the turbolift to Deck 5 in complete silence – aside from his growling stomach – and walked into sickbay together. She went immediately to the nurse's station and he could hear her introducing herself to the rest of the staff.

It took him a few moments to realize he was staring at her. Was she really going to act like the past few days hadn't happened? He felt his heart sink a little, but then his communicator chirped. He groaned, pulled the device from his belt, and drawled, "McCoy."

 _"Commander Spock here. Do you have the reports I requested yesterday_?"

"I sent you the status on the inventory report," McCoy replied. "I'm still waiting to hear back from the department heads about a convenient time for inoculations."

Granted, he'd sent the memo sometime around 2345 the night before, so he wasn't exactly shocked when no one had replied right away.

" _Please see to it and have it to me by 1100 hours. Spock out_."

Leonard's fists involuntarily clenched. He respected the hell out of Spock and somewhere deep down, he even liked the ascetic bastard, but it wouldn't be a typical morning in sickbay without the first officer shoving his nose ever harder into the grindstone.

He needed to coordinate patient care for the day and get a work schedule set up, but it could wait a few minutes while he checked his messages. He lied to himself and said it had _nothing_ to do with avoiding Christine: he just wanted to get the vaccination schedule together for the departments.

No sooner did he slump down in his chair than Christine strolled in, brandishing a coffee and a blueberry scone. She set them down on his desk and said, "Nurse St. Claire is with Crewman Dominguez and he's doing well. He's not due for the second stage of tissue regeneration for another three hours. There's nothing else to report."

He stared at the scone, wondering just how the hell she knew blueberry pastries were his favorite. Probably a lucky guess.

"Uh, _right_ ," he replied, also wondering how long he was supposed to keep up the charade that they were only vague acquaintances and she hadn't had a mental breakdown in a turbolift the morning before and attacked the first officer.

"I'm going to need your help pulling together this upcoming mission to Sulibaa," he said, grasping at anything to keep the conversation going.

"I already sent Nurse Riley to help the logistics officers with the inventory, and if it's alright with you, I'd like to put Nurse Heikkinen in charge of a team of medics to vaccinate the crew."

"Don't jump the gun just yet," he replied. "I haven't even pulled endemic diseases-"

"There are four recommended vaccines, according to the Starfleet medical database. I've already notified the lab to standby to process them. I hope I didn't overstep my bounds."

Leonard blinked. "Well, normally I'm the one who gives orders to the lab."

"I apologize, doctor. It's going to take me a while to get used to this crew and how it operates. On the _Constellation_ , Nurse Drury often requisitioned medical supplies from the lab with the doctor's consent. I'm new to this whole chief nurse thing, so I imagine it's going to take some time to get a rapport going."

A _rapport_? Not that long ago, they'd had a pretty _amazing_ rapport. Then life, history, and the real world had gotten in the way.

"I was only trying to show initiative," she added.

Leonard's eyebrow arched. There wasn't a day that went by in his sickbay that he didn't feel overwhelmed, and he wouldn't mind a few more people with a can-do, proactive attitude. "Uh, right. If Nurse Riley is down in the cargo bay with the logistics folks, then who-"

"I intended to run the intake desk myself and kill several birds with one stone. It will let me get familiar with this sickbay's operations, I'll be nearby should Crewman Dominguez need anything, and it will give me the chance to research special medical considerations for Suliban with genetic enhancements, unless of course you wanted to do it. I assumed you would have your hands full."

His mouth started to fall open. He'd forgotten all about that. "Sounds good. Meanwhile, I need to get back to coming up with a vaccine schedule. We need to get the entire crew rotated in here in the next forty-eight hours-"

"Why would we rotate the crew through sickbay?" she asked.

"For their vaccinations?" he reminded her, trying not to sneer.

"Wouldn't it make more sense to dispatch teams of medics to each individual department rather than make everyone come _here_? It's a lot more efficient that way."

Leonard blinked. That _did_ sound a lot easier. "Well, I still need to get with the department heads and get a by-name roster of each landing party."

"Certainly, doctor. Would you like me to work on that?"

Her face was calm and expressionless, pretty and composed. Frustration nibbled at him. Why was she trying so hard to pretend like everything was normal?

"Can we have a private word?" he asked.

Her face fell slightly but she nodded and hit the door release. The moment it slid shut behind her, he leaned back in his chair, waved his arms around his office and said, "What is this?"

She glanced at his desk and said, "Black coffee and a blueberry scone. Can I get you something else?"

He scoffed, staring down at the meal she'd brought him. "You know what I mean. I mean, thank you for the breakfast, but come on, Chris- _Nurse Chapel_ , yesterday you had a panic attack in a turbolift and today you're acting like it's business as usual."

"I'm fine," she said, her voice low but free of hostility.

"Don't piss on me and tell me it's raining," he snapped.

A defensive sneer sneaked across her face and she squared her shoulders. "Look, I'm doing my best to fit in with this crew and do my job. If you have any complaints about my performance, let me know. But otherwise, leave my personal life out of it. Dr. M'Benga has prescribed me a weekly treatment of proazium, and so far, and I have to say, I'm feeling pretty ok. Now unless you have anything else, I'd like to get back to work."

He narrowed his eyes and stared at her, but her face was smooth as glass. He sighed heavily, and without taking his eyes off of her said, "I used to do a shift brief before and after with Nurse Yamashita, the old Head Nurse. I'd like to keep that going. Otherwise, thanks for breakfast."

He didn't intend for his tone to grow so dark and almost threatening, but the moment he was finished speaking, she cocked her head and said, "Certainly, doctor."

She raised her hand to hit the switch and open the door and he added, "And you know, Nurse Chapel, you're always welcome to come talk to me."

She gave a slight nod without saying anything else and was gone. He lowered his head to the short desk and closed his eyes. His communicator chirped, and without raising his forehead from the smooth glass, he extracted the device and mumbled, "McCoy."

" _Commander Spock here. I have enacted a change to the protocols for submitting logs…_ "

He set the communicator on the desk and listened to Spock drone. He took a sip of the coffee and was pleasantly surprised. It was hot but not _too_ hot, black, but a very smooth blend.

 _Christine had brought him coffee_. He felt helplessly wistful. She was caring, thoughtful, funny, and gorgeous. She was also hardheaded, temperamental, addicted to her work, and emotionally damaged. How could a woman be so perfect, flaws and all?

" _Doctor McCoy_?" Spock said through the communicator.

He hit the button on his communicator and groaned, " _What_?"

" _Did you receive my last instructions_?"

He massaged his forehead with his fingertips. He could already tell it was going to be _that_ kind of day.


	10. Emotional Challenges

The warm _whoosh_ of the transporter beam dissipated and the planet Sulibaa came rapidly into focus. It was a dichromatic scene painted in hues of orange and red, caked with dust and swelteringly hot.

"Remind you of home?" a warm voice asked behind her.

Christine was about to laugh and say this was nothing like Ohio when a resonant, monotone voice replied, "It shares some similarities with both Vulcan and New Vulcan, though there are notable differences."

Christine turned to see the handsome Vulcan first officer and Nyota Uhura smiling at one another. Well, at least the Nyota was smiling – Commander Spock was staring at her with the same disinterested passion that a scientist might reserve for a petri dish of interesting bacteria. Maria had told her they were dating, which seemed both completely unbelievable and entirely plausible at the same time.

Christine had met the other members of her landing party briefly in the transporter room, but she'd had difficulty making eye contact with Commander Spock after what she'd done to him in the turbolift. No one had said anything about that unfortunate incident though, which was _weird_.

During the past two days aboard _Enterprise_ , she'd encountered nothing but welcoming handshakes and invitations to share meals or join in on movie night. Maria had introduced her to Nyota and Charlene Masters yesterday evening at dinner and they'd all gone back to Maria's quarters and had a few drinks and laughs. For a few hours, Christine had felt _normal_.

The crew of _Enterprise_ seemed to be just like Captain Kirk and Maria had promised – friendly and non-judgmental. She'd had a lot of friends on the _Constellation_ , but it had taken time to get to know everyone. This new assignment was working out better than she could have hoped – she'd buried the hatchet with Jim Kirk, renewed her friendship with Maria Heikkinen, and was actually enjoying the job of chief nurse.

She felt at home and that had her worried; she felt like she was living a lie. All these new friends she was making… would they still be her friends once it eventually leaked that she'd slept with the CMO?

Awkward was a word that didn't even begin to describe the relationship she shared with Dr. McCoy. She tried hard to keep up appearances in front of the rest of the medical staff, but since that meeting in his office two days ago, they'd barely spoken a word to each other. She was pretty sure she'd done most of the talking, while he resigned himself to occasional grunts and surly facial expressions.

"Has everyone activated their universal translators?" Lieutenant Uhura asked.

Christine shifted the medical bag to her left hand and tapped the chip embedded in the right shoulder of her uniform. She heard three short beeps, followed by discordant echoes from the other members of the landing party performing the same ritual.

"And the transporter beacons?" Uhura added.

Christine checked the flat little bobble pinned to her left sleeve. Personal transporter beacons were standard operating procedure on any away mission in the event someone needed to be transported back to the ship on short notice, but they were particularly important on this mission. The threat of unpredictable ion storms and continuing seismic activity made them absolutely essential.

At least that's what they'd been briefed. As far as Christine was aware, the 200,000 Suliban inhabitants didn't have the luxury of taking shelter on board a starship in the event of an ion storm, so the little beacon swinging from her left shoulder really felt like a sad badge of privilege more than a lifeline.

They were on the outskirts of a devastated city center and there were a handful of Suliban citizens moving through the rubble-filled streets. They found their way to the refugee center where they were supposed rendezvous with the other landing parties. It was a sad and barely standing structure reinforced by energy fields with about fifty people wandering around outside.

"Please won't you help us?" a woman cried as they approached. "They won't even let us in! My husband, he's dying!"

She was a regal woman – tall and bald with amber dappled skin. Based on her previous physiology research, Christine assumed she must be Cabalan Suliban. A small boy peeked out from behind her dirty robes and instantly disappeared again.

Her heart nearly ruptured with empathy. Christine lengthened her stride and announced, "That's what we're here to do: _help_."

The woman's face was torn by an expression that could only be interpreted as disbelieving relief. The Cabalan Suliban woman opened her mouth to speak, but the door to the refugee center flung open and a short Suliban man appeared and waved them forward.

"You are the Federation relief workers?" he asked.

"We are," Commander Spock replied. "With whom do I speak?"

The crowd of people outside the building began shouting and drowned out the man's response. Christine's ears were attuned to the Suliban woman's voice, and through the pandemonium she could hear the woman yelling that he was a selfish racist who was letting innocent children die.

The chaos quickly turned violent when a rock went sailing from somewhere in the crowd and smashed into the doorframe above the man's head. Three more Suliban appeared behind the man in the doorway, drew tiny energy pistols, and began firing into the angry mob.

Things began to move in slow motion. She could see people falling to the ground, leaving little puffs of dust as they fell. Others began ducking for cover on the sides of the building or behind large pieces of debris. Only when Carson, one of the paramedics, grabbed her by the shoulder and shoved her to the ground did things begin to move at normal speed.

Minutes later – or was it only seconds? – everything went quiet. There was nothing but the ringing in her ears and the sound of her own breathing. She closed her eyes and visions of the _Constellation_ flashed through her mind, sending a shudder through her body. She opened her eyes to erase the painful images, feeling the powdery dust form a gritty film on her eyes.

"Spock to _Enterprise_ ," she heard him say over her shoulder.

Christine pushed herself up from the ground and half ran, half staggered to the nearest Suliban victim: a small man, perhaps a teenager. On approach she could already see the rise and fall of his chest and felt a flurry of hope as she sank to her knees next to him.

"They will be fine," called a voice. She whipped her head around to see the man still standing in this doorway, now with his arms crossed.

"Why would you fire on these people?" she shrieked, not even bothering to conceal her disgust and rage.

"They were only lightly stunned," he retorted. "They will regain consciousness almost immediately. I recommend you move quickly before they make another attempt to assault you."

"They weren't assaulting us," Lieutenant Uhura replied, her tone firm and angry.

"What the devil is going on here?" shouted another voice in the distance.

Christine didn't even have to turn to see it was Dr. McCoy. She'd recognize that lazy yet charming accent anywhere. The second landing party must have arrived.

"Help… me…" the Suliban teenager mumbled. "My sister… she… needs medicine."

Christine took a deep breath and directed Carson and Battaglia, the two paramedics who had come down with her in the first landing party, to start triaging the patients on the ground. The Suliban teen sat up and identified himself as Jajin.

As she started scanning him with her tricorder, she could hear Dr. McCoy and Commander Spock consulting with the man from the refugee center. Apparently her assumption had been correct – the people outside were Cabal descendants and the other Suliban didn't want to allow them into the refugee processing center. Moreover, he demanded that they treat the non-Cabal Suliban before attending to the "dregs" outside.

Her hands shook with anger as she listened to the conversation behind her and tried to reassure her patient that he was going to be fine – _bruised_ , but fine. The first officer remained calm and continued to insist that they were here to assist all of the casualties in order of their severity, not by order of ethnicity. Dr. McCoy was a lot more vocal with his feelings on the matter.

"They're _people_! They're not garbage, dammit!" he growled.

"Doctor, a word," Spock interjected, nodding to the Suliban man and stepping back from the doorway.

As they walked in her direction, he sputtered, "Spock, you can't really tell me you agree with what they're doing?"

"Discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, particularly as a determinant of healthcare is immoral, unethical, and illogical," Commander Spock replied. "Yet we are not here to alter their society: we are here to provide relief assistance and re-stabilize their planet's core. Arguing accomplishes nothing."

"So you're saying we should do what they're asking?"

"No, I am saying we should attempt to seek a compromise."

Christine noticed Jajin was staring at both men and listening also. Remembering that she was the chief nurse and also responsible for directing medical care, she rose to her feet and said, "Couldn't we just split our resources? Half of us go and help the people in the refugee center and the other half help the ones outside?"

"We are of one mind, Lieutenant Chapel," Spock replied, folding his hands behind his back.

"You want to treat them out here?" Dr. McCoy scoffed, looking around at the dusty scene.

"It's not ideal, but do we have a choice?" she rebutted, helping Jajin to his feet. "It doesn't sound like they're going to let these people in unless we force them. We could set up a bivouac-"

"Pardon me, kind people," Jajin interrupted, his voice apologetic, hoarse, and choked with dust. "Most of us have taken shelter in the caves north of here. Most of our settlement was destroyed and the caves are the only place that offers any protection from the ion storms."

"The caves are not a recommended location due to the persistent seismic activity," Spock replied.

"I know," Jajin shrugged. "But there is no where else."

Christine could see the third landing party approaching and rather than allow more people to stand around asking questions, she decided to take charge. "I can go with Jajin and help the people in the caves. After the fourth landing party arrives, I'll take half the medical team and go."

"I intend to send a security and engineering team as well," Spock replied. "Our mission extends beyond medical relief – we are here to assist the Suliban in re-stabilizing the planet's climate as well."

Christine nodded, thinking even if they managed to terraform the planet into a paradise, the Suliban social problems would probably rip it to shreds anyway. It was strange to think humanity had once been this way, but the fact that humanity had finally gotten their act together after countless wars and nearly destroying Earth gave her hope for these people.

"So you will come with us?" Jajin reconfirmed, smiling nervously. "My sister is sick from the ion storms. She needs medicine."

"Yeah, kid, we're going to help," Dr. McCoy said, beating Christine to the punch. She shot him a glance and saw he still looked agitated, and the moment he noticed she was looking at him, he looked away.

"Jajin, can you go round up the others?" she asked. "Tell them we'll meet them at the caves?"

He gave a weak grin and trotted off to inform the other Cabalan Suliban who had scattered after the attack by the people inside the refugee center.

"Are you sure you're up for this?" McCoy muttered.

"Yeah. Why?"

"I'm just saying, I don't think it's a good idea for someone with claustrophobia to be crawlin' around in caves is all."

She bristled at his comment. "I'll be fine. The proazium has been helping a lot-"

He opened his mouth to argue but she raised her voice and cut him off. "And if at any point I stop being _fine_ , I'll let you know."

He made a face and put his hands on his hips. "Fine. But I intend to lead the away team to the caves. I _am_ the ranking medical officer."

She narrowed her eyes and scowled but gave a brief nod of her head. They'd just talked more in the last thirty seconds than they had in the past two days. She wanted to build a professional relationship with him and that wasn't going to work if they were constantly looking for excuses to argue over pointless things.

When the fourth and final away team arrived, they split the medical staff into two teams – Dr. M'Benga and Nurses St. Claire and Heikkinen would stay at the refugee center with three of the paramedics and Christine, Dr. McCoy, Nurse Riley, and the other three paramedics would go to the caves. They were assigned a small security detail and a team of engineers to inspect the structural integrity of the caves and given half the supplies from the ship. The Suliban in the refugee center were furious, but Christine figured that was Commander Spock's problem to handle.

Since the caves were more than thirty kilometers away, they coordinated with _Enterprise_ to initiate a site-to-site transport for the crew and the 67 refugees who couldn't get into the refugee center. When they arrived at the mouth of the caves, she wasn't prepared for the utter devastation that they found. Ordinarily on relief missions such as these, they worked alongside the local medical staff, filling in where needed. These people had no doctors, no nurses, no supplies.

She immediately went into emergency mode and even recruited the security personnel to help with triage while Dr. McCoy called back to the ship and requested additional medical supplies and any personnel with medical training to report to the surface of the planet.

Most of the people who had come to the refugee center only had minor injuries, if they were even injured at all, so Christine had subconsciously made the mistaken assumption that they were just going to show up, hand out a few bandages, fashion a few splints, and call it a day. The reality was much more sobering.

She could see a massive pile of rubble about two kilometers away from her vantage point, which apparently had been the Cabalite settlement. The earthquakes had completely leveled it – not a single building remained standing. She guessed there were about a thousand people huddled and dying in the caves, but based on the size of the small township below, she figured less than a tenth of the population had survived.

Some of the less injured people had spent the past few days pulling survivors from the wreckage, but it appeared all that remained in the devastated city below were thousands of dead bodies. A quick life sign scan from _Enterprise_ in orbit confirmed that sad fact, which had the unfortunate result of crushing the lingering hopes of the survivors of being reunited with missing loved ones.

The paramedics and reinforcements with first-aid training Dr. McCoy had requested got to work treating the non-surgical patients while Christine and Lisa Riley worked on the minor surgical casualties. That left Dr. McCoy with the worst job of all – a single surgeon with fifty critical surgical patients and counting.

He'd asked the captain to send Dr. Jarvis, the Gamma shift surgeon, despite Starfleet protocols that at least one physician had to remain on board at all times. Kirk would have complied too, if Jarvis weren't busy performing surgery on a crewman who'd been injured in a plasma fire in main engineering. He'd promised to send Dr. Jarvis along later, but for now, Dr. McCoy was on his own and being forced to make split-second decisions about who would live and who would die.

The feeling of helplessness among the _Enterprise_ crew was palpable. Treating all these people with the limited resources they had was like trying to bale out the ocean with a teaspoon, but they never quit trying.

She was fiercely proud of Nurse Riley, who'd only graduated Starfleet Academy last month. _Enterprise_ was her first assignment and this was her first away mission, and though she'd started the day off looking terrified, she was really coming into her own after a few hours on the ground. She was still very green an inexperienced, but it was obvious she was going to turn into an incredible nurse in due time.

The hours ticked on but Christine barely noticed. As she continued to wind her way through one narrow tunnel after another to assist people, the growing darkness and increasingly tight spaces started to get to her and she only managed to push forward by hyper-focusing on her patients.

As she checked the makeshift splint and dressing on a woman with a compound femur fracture, she could hear Dr. McCoy's voice echoing off the walls in the distance. It sounded like he was in the middle of a cardiac surgery and he was swearing at a security officer, informing him that he would be getting a neurological exam when they got back to the ship if he couldn't "stop shaking and hold the damn light still" while McCoy closed the patient up.

"He sounds very angry," the woman mumbled.

Christine made eye contact with her and smiled. "He's not. That's just his way."

" _Ah_ ," she nodded. "My husband was like that. A stern voice and a kind heart."

Christine knew better than to about the woman's husband. "What is your name?"

"I am Mina."

"Well Mina, I'm going to need to reset your leg, but I'll give you something for the pain before we start."

"No, save it for someone who needs it. I can cope with pain."

"We have more than enough," Christine told her, adjusting the dosage meter on her hypospray.

"I would have liked to be a doctor," Mina said weakly.

She delivered the injection into Mina's neck and responded, "Why didn't you? It seems like your people have a shortage of people with medical training."

"Cabalan Suliban are not permitted to learn medical trades," she explained.

"Why?" Christine asked, sensing her questions were bordering on offensive.

"The Suliban believe our genetic enhancements are a threat; that is why we are prohibited from learning sciences or medicine. They do not want us genetically enhancing ourselves."

Christine swallowed hard and looked into Mina's hazel eyes. They were tired and disinterested. "I am very sorry to hear that."

"You do not think it is fair?" Mina asked.

She took a deep breath and replied, "I guess it doesn't matter what I think."

"It matters."

"I'm just here to help," Christine replied, pulling the dirty bandage away from the wound on Mina's thigh.

"When my father brought our family here from Tandar, he said we would have a better life. He said nothing could be worse than living under Tandaran authority. My grandfather was in the detention camps years ago. But now our own people treat us worse than the Tandarans ever did. They might not put us in camps, but we are not allowed to live within the cities. We're not allowed to marry other Suliban."

"Why do the other Suliban fear the Cabalan Suliban so much?"

"My ancestors did unspeakable things."

"So did mine," Christine replied, cutting away the last of the dressing to expose the wound. "But I am not my ancestors."

"How do you mean?"

"Humans once fought wars against each other and denied many people many rights for all kinds of petty reasons – gender, skin color, personal beliefs. Some humans even used to keep other humans as slaves."

"But you do not do those things anymore?"

"Earth isn't perfect and it took many centuries and a lot of suffering, but no human treats any other human the way the non-Cabalan Suliban treat you and your people."

"But we are not _truly_ Suliban. The other Suliban believe our genetic enhancements make us an inferior sub-species."

"Even if that _were_ true, it doesn't make you lesser than them. It doesn't mean you shouldn't be allowed to become a doctor or marry whomever you wish."

Christine bit her tongue, wondering she'd crossed a line by proselytizing to another culture, but she'd never been able to understand the rationale behind oppression, especially oppression on this scale. She finished setting Mina's leg, redressed it, gave her a second dose of analgesic to help her rest, and continued to shuffle through the masses.

Thirty-six hours later, all of the urgent and critical patients had either died or been attended to and most of the minor injuries had been treated by other _Enterprise_ personnel with first aid training. She hadn't been this exhausted since the _Constellation_ incident, and though they'd lost a lot of patients, they'd saved a lot too.

She was leaning against the wall and almost dozing off when Crewman Battaglia tapped her on the shoulder.

"Have you eaten anything?" he asked, offering a ration pack.

"No," she sighed, feeling her stomach twisting around in knots at the mere thought of food. She took the meal pack and asked, "Have you gotten any rest?"

"The paramedics are trying to rotate out, but Dr. McCoy asked for someone to start working on giving the kids checkups and vaccines if they didn't have anything to do."

"I can do that," she told him, patting him on the shoulder. "Go get a nap."

"Are you sure, ma'am?"

"I'm the chief nurse. It wouldn't exactly be right for me to be sleeping while the paramedics are still slaving away, would it?"

He tried to protest but she insisted, and once she was sure he was heading to the small camp they'd set up for the _Enterprise_ crew near the mouth of the cave, she collected her tricorder, a new hypospray, and several dozen vaccine vials and set off for the makeshift orphanage in a smaller cave compartment near the back of the cave.

There were about forty children and a few women packed into the small room. Someone had managed to hang a single electric lamp from the ceiling, which cast unusual shadows across the walls as people moved about. Some of the children were playing, others sleeping, and still others looked lost and confused.

She spied Dr. McCoy as she moved around a broad stalagmite and the scene before her instantly warmed her heart.

" _Buzz buzz buzz_ says the bee," he cooed, waving his hypospray around in the air before giving the tiny girl in his lap an injection in her neck.

The girl giggled and clapped her hands. McCoy continued, "See, that wasn't so bad, was it?"

She shook her head. He leaned in closely and asked, "Have you ever had a butterscotch?"

She shook her head again and he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of candy and handed it to her. She studied the object in her hand and several of the older children started to take notice. He pulled another one from his pocket and popped it in his mouth. The girl carefully unwrapped hers, and the moment it touched her tongue, her face glowed in delight.

The children began to swarm around him and Christine took that as her cue to come out from her hidden vantage point. She met his gaze and for a fraction of a second, they both started to smile. Before he showed his teeth, he raised his eyebrows and asked, "Nurse Chapel, can you help me with getting these kids some vaccines?"

"Certainly, doctor."

She coordinated with the Suliban women to help organize the children into groups. Working with Dr. McCoy turned out to be a lot less uncomfortable than she'd thought. He showed her his medical bag where he kept a secret stash of sweets and together they worked their way through the temporary orphanage, giving vaccines and routine exams.

"What is this?" one small boy asked while she was checking his vitals.

She looked around and noticed he was pointing at the transporter beacon on her left shoulder.

"It tells the people on my ship where I am."

"Can I have it?" he asked.

"Afraid not," she replied apologetically, giving him a shot with the hypospray. "But I think I have a piece of candy with your name on it."

"Nurse Chapel, do you have a canister of endaprolone?" Dr. McCoy called from across the room. "I've got a kiddo here with a tummy ache."

"Does it have to be endaprolone or will any anti-emetic work?" she asked.

"I'd prefer endaprolone because of the slightly acidic Suliban blood chemistry."

"I can go get some from the aid station," she replied, offering the boy a strawberry flavored candy and rising to her feet.

"I can get it," he insisted, moving in her direction.

"I'll go. Besides, I'm down to my last canister of rilavar."

Dr. McCoy rubbed his temples and sighed.

"Are you feeling alright, doctor? Your face is flushed."

"It's hot enough down here that hens would be picking up worms with potholders," he huffed, wiping his forehead with the back of his sleeve.

"Drink some water," she replied, tossing him a canteen from her medical bag.

He caught it, unscrewed the lid, and sniffed the liquid gingerly before taking a prolonged series of gulps. Christine knelt down and started packing up her medical bag to go back to the aid station and refill their supplies. She was about to ask him if he needed anything besides the endaprolone when she looked over and saw a little girl trying to get his attention.

"What is it sweetheart?" he asked, kneeling down.

"Are you going to leave us?" she whispered.

"Not right now," he replied.

"Please don't go," she begged, pulling him into a tight embrace.

Christine saw a pained frown crest his mouth as he hugged her and patted her back. "I can stay in here with you tonight if it will make you feel better."

The girl started to cry and Leonard picked her up and continued rubbing her back. Christine looked away – it was the only strategy she had for avoiding tears, and one she'd had to employ more times today than she wanted to admit.

As she was sorting through their diminished supplies, several of the children approached her and asked if they could have more candy, and after checking the amount left in the bag, she passed them a few more pieces and told them to share with their friends.

"Any chance I could convince you to grab my bedroll from the aid station while you're there?"

"You're _really_ going to sleep in here?" she asked.

"Well, I made a promise," he replied, looking back at the girl who had been scooped up by one of the Suliban women.

"I thought you said you had a terrible bedside manner?" Christine sighed.

"I _do_ ," Dr. McCoy shrugged, gesturing to the girl. "But these… these are kids."

"Kids _are_ people," she teased.

"You know what I mean."

"Yeah, I do." Their eyes locked again and she felt her heart skip a beat. They were both exhausted, physically and emotionally, but the resolute expression on his sweaty face was the nicest thing she'd seen in days.

" _Arjia_?" someone yelled in the distance.

Christine looked down the tunnel leading into the makeshift orphanage and saw a shadowy figure approaching. As the person drew closer, she realized it was Jajin, and when he recognized her, he blurted, "I cannot find my sister Arjia. Is she in here?"

"She went there," a boy said, pointing to a narrow access tunnel leading to another section of the cave complex.

"I'm going back to the aid station," Christine said. "I'll help you look for her."

"Thank you," he said breathlessly, cutting across the cave toward the indicated passage.

Christine slung her bag over her shoulder and started to follow Jajin but Dr. McCoy gently touched her shoulder. "Be careful."

"Always," she nodded.

"And thank you, Nurse Chapel," he added.

She shrugged uncomfortably and said, "It's my job."

"Yeah well, all the same."

She made her way to the passage and squeezed through the narrow entrance. Jajin helped her keep her balance as she stumbled across several jagged rocks. She pulled her tricorder from her belt and activated the light on the end and realized her hands were shaking.

She shined the light down the constricted passageway and realized it split into two paths. "Do you know your way around these tunnels?"

"I have not been back here in a long time," he admitted, his frantic tone made worse by the echoes bouncing off the rocky walls. "Things look different after the earthquakes."

"Don't panic," she told him, wishing she could take her own advice.

"I have to find her; she's all I have left," he gasped. " _Arjia_!"

"We'll find her," Christine reassured him, noting her voice was starting to shake. Why did this tunnel have to be so damn dark? "I'll check the passage on the right and you can check the passage on the left."

The words were barely out of her mouth before Jajin was trotting away down the left side of the passage. Christine inhaled several times and shuffled forward through the tight space. Her heart started to pound as she had to stand on her tiptoes and suck her belly in to squeeze through the tight gap on the right.

I can do this," she choked. " _I can do this_."

Then the ground started to shake.


	11. Valley of Ghosts

"This place is hotter than a Vulcan sauna," Dr. McCoy mumbled, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve.

He was utterly exhausted and lethargic, and for what felt like the first time in days, he had a moment to collect his thoughts. Unfortunately, he didn't really know where to start. He guessed he'd lost about 150 or 160 patients since their arrival, but most of them had been too far-gone to save anyway. Still, it didn't make it any easier.

He'd been gruff with his team – and some of his patients to boot – but all in all, everyone had performed well above his expectations. He knew Battaglia was due for a promotion and he intended to see that he put in the recommendation the moment they got back to the ship. And though Nurse Riley looked like she was about twelve years old and was still wet behind the ears, she had natural talent for the nursing profession. He'd been unsure about her after their first few encounters, but she was going to do just fine. Then there was Christine…

So much for trying to keep _her_ off his mind. For all their awkward difficulties, he had no problem admitting she was the best nurse he'd ever met. He loved that she could take charge without barking orders and could be tender with her patients without being too emotional. It was rare to find someone who possessed competence, intelligence, confidence, and an unyielding worth ethic. It was like the woman had no flaws.

Leonard laughed to himself. That _definitely_ wasn't true. Christine Chapel could be flighty and moody and completely intransigent. He felt like he knew three different versions of her. There was the fun, carefree Christine he'd met at speed dating who could carry on a conversation about anything and eat her body weight in pizza, the frozen and emotionally conflicted Christine who occupied herself with denial and crying, and then there was Nurse Christine Chapel. She was complex, but he figured everyone was, in their own way.

He was about to go back to giving checkups when he heard a flurry of laughter behind him. It was the sort of sound that seemed to reach across all cultures, languages, and species – it was the sound of boys up to no good.

He managed to make eye contact with the youngest – a boy of about five – for a fraction of second before his golden eyes darted away in shame.

"Care to tell me what's so funny?" Leonard asked.

The boys started to scatter but Leonard noticed something red and shiny in one of their hands and knew right away what it was.

"Where did you get that?" he snapped, pointing at the transporter beacon and checking his left sleeve.

Leonard's was still safely secured to his shoulder, so his best guess was the boy had taken Christine's. He didn't even try to deny it: he stopped, turned on his heel, and held it out in his palm like an offering.

" _Well_?" Leonard asked. "Care to tell me where you got that?"

The boy looked down at the ground and mumbled something unintelligible. "Stealing is wrong," he growled, plucking the transporter beacon from his outstretched hand. "And these aren't _toys_. They're very sensitive equipment."

Before he could lay into him further, the communicator on his belt chirped. Leonard sighed and slid the beacon into his pocket. It was hard to be mad at him: Suliban didn't even have enough food or water, let alone toys for the children play with. "Go on, go play with your friends."

He flipped his communications device open and said, "McCoy here."

" _Dr. Mc- the- it's getting- stand_?"

He activated the transmit button and said, "You're breaking up. Please repeat."

" _Dr. McCoy, do-transp-to Enterprise-by-_ "

He glanced around at the shiny walls of the dark cave and scowled. The engineers had said there would be a lot of signal interference due to the high concentrations of iron, lead, and gallacite in the cave rock and he was standing deep within the cave system.

He started walking back toward the entrance, waving to the nervous little girl to signal that he would be coming right back, and continued trying to make contact with the ship. "Please repeat."

" _I- again, standby for transport- minutes_ ," said Ensign M'Ress, one of the junior communications officers.

"What?" he snapped in frustration.

" _Dr. McCoy, you- Nurse Chapel are on the last transport- room has a lock on your beacon_ ," M'Ress said. " _Standby_."

"Are you telling me you're transporting us out of here _now_?" he sighed. "We have more work to do, that's unaccept-"

" _Bones, there's another ion storm heading your way and sensors are detecting an increase in seismic activity_ ," cracked the captain's voice through the communicator. " _It's not safe down there_."

As if on cue, the ground trembled slightly and he heard a few nervous groans and yelps from the hundreds of Suliban huddled against the walls.

"Jim, you can't expect us to just leave these people here," Bones replied, realizing just how precarious the situation was.

The cave would largely protect them from the ion storm, but it wasn't exactly an ideal location for riding out an earthquake. He was in the middle of wondering whether it would be better to die from radiation or get crushed to death when he noticed several members of the ship's security team ushering people further into the caves and reassuring them that everything would be ok.

" _I know it's tough and we all want to help these people, but you and the rest of the crew are my number one priority_ ," Jim replied. His words were no longer broken but the signal was still terrible. " _We're leaving the supplies on the surface, and once it's clear, we'll send you back down. It's been 40 hours – you're all due for rest anyway_."

Leonard thought of his promise to Neesia, the orphaned Suliban girl. He'd told her he would stay the night to make her feel better, and now he was being ordered to go back on his word. Before he could protest, the captain added, " _The final transport will be in five minutes. Make sure Nurse Chapel gets the word and your transport beacons are active_."

"Jim, please-"

" _Kirk out_."

Leonard slammed the communicator closed and swore under his breath. The thought of leaving Neesia alone tore at him. She reminded him so much of Joanna – the excited eyes, the soft pitch of her voice.

"Please don't leave," begged a man, reaching for his arm. "You promised you would help my mother and that was hours and hours ago. She still needs medicine."

He fought to repress gnawing guilt. He understood the captain's position, and yet… It was easy for Jim to tell the away team they had to pack up and leave – _he_ wasn't the one who had to explain it to the desperate people they were leaving behind. Soon Leonard was inundated with more pleas and demands for help and he tried to keep his thoughts focused on ushering the last of the security team back toward the mouth of the cave for transport. When he arrived at the aid station, he realized two things in almost immediate succession – Christine wasn't there and he had her transporter beacon in his pocket.

Leonard looked at the three security officers and asked, "Hey, you seen Nurse Chapel?"

"No, not for hours," Lieutenant Rawlings replied. "Was she on one of the earlier transports back to the ship?"

"No, she was coming to the aid station about twenty minutes ago-" His words caught in his throat. Christine _had_ been coming to the aid station, until she ducked off to help a boy find his little sister.

His communicator chimed again and he fumbled it open. " _Scotty to McCoy, I hae a lock on yer five beacons_ -"

He shoved his thumb down on the transmit button so hard it cracked the joint. " _Four_ : there are only four of us. Christine- Nurse Chapel is unaccounted for."

" _What're ya talking aboot_? _Yer standin' right next ta her_. _I see it on scans_."

The ground rumbled again, harder this time, and screams echoed from further back in the cave where nearly a thousand Suliban survivors were huddled for shelter. "Dammit, I don't have time to explain. A kid stole her transporter beacon."

" _Ah, well, that's a wee bit of a problem_ ," Scotty replied.

" _Why_? Just scan for human lifesigns and try to get a lock that way."

" _I can barely get a lock on those beacons_ ," the chief engineer wailed. " _I cannae find any lifesigns through all that gallacite_."

Leonard's mouth went dry. He barked into the communicator, "Pull everyone else up. I'm going to go find her."

" _I cannae do that_ ," Scotty insisted. " _Orders are to bring everyone. I'll just beam ya aboard and we'll try to-"_

"No, dammit!" he closed the communicator and rushed back down the maze of tunnels toward the makeshift orphanage. The security officers started to follow him, but they didn't seem eager to push their luck while wearing red shirts.

The moment he felt the warm, hazy sensation of the transporter, he ripped the beacon from his sleeve and tossed it, along with Christine's, to two women crouched along a low wall.

He kept running further and further into the dimly lit caves, trying to avoid tripping over people or getting bogged down in panicked questions. When he finally made his way back to the temporary orphanage, he instantly spied Neesia.

"You came back!" Neesia cried, lunging forward to hug him.

"Yeah, listen sweetheart, have you seen Christine?"

"Who?"

"The human lady who was with me. The one with the yellow hair?"

"She went to find Arjia." Two Suliban women approached, interested in Leonard's unexpected return. "She was screaming."

"Screaming? Is she ok? Where did she _go_?" Leonard asked.

The ground shivered once again and Neesia's eyes grew wide. "Down that way. That's a bad place. No good." She pointed a chubby finger in the direction of a crevice in the wall.

"Ok, listen, I'll be right back," he started to explain. He was interrupted by Neesia's panicked pleas to stay and the women's appeals for information.

"Look, I'll come back, just sit tight." He didn't care much at that particular moment that he was being rude to the women. It killed him to leave Neesia, but she had people to look after her. He slipped into the narrow tunnel, finding it hard to believe Christine had managed to overcome her claustrophobia to even pass through the entrance.

" _Christine_!" he yelled.

He strained his ears and heard nothing but the sounds of frightened children in tunnel behind him. He called for her as he wound his way through the cramped and increasingly dark tunnel. " _Christine_!"

The narrow space diverged and he gritted his teeth. Left or right? Fifty-fifty. " _Christine_! _Arjia_!"

He thought he heard a sound somewhere off to the right, but he couldn't be sure. He turned on the light at the end of his communicator and shined it around the passageway. " _Christine_! _Anyone_!"

"Leonard?" It was so faint he initially thought his mind was playing tricks on him, but as he squeezed through the impossibly small crack on the right, he heard it more clearly.

"Leonard?"

There was definitive panic in her tone. He stumbled, crawled, and wriggled his way through the narrow passage, " _Christine, are you ok_?"

"Leonard, some rocks fell and I can't find my way-"

The ground started shaking again and he heard a sharp scream pierce the stale air. Unlike the small quakes from earlier, this one continued and grew more intense. Rocks of various sizes pinged off his head and back and dust choked his lungs. He raised his arms to try and protect his head and neck and closed his eyes, thinking he was probably going to die down here.

A minute seemed to stretch into an hour. He gritted his teeth, waiting for the end to come any moment. Eventually he realized that though he was still shaking, the ground had stopped seizing. He could hear the muffled sounds of children screaming and crying behind him and took several slow breaths. He opened his eyes and blinked furiously, wondering if he'd been blinded somehow, only to realize the orphanage's overhead electric light was no longer on and his communicator gone, probably in pieces on the cave floor.

He heard soft panting up ahead that crescendoed into a high-pitched scream. His blood ran cold. " _Christine_! God, Christine, are you ok?"

"Leonard, please!" she shouted, her voice garbled and tinged with fear and agony.

He could barely move, but her frantic tone drove him forward. Her breathing accelerated and she burst into hysterical sobs; he had no way of knowing if she was having a panic attack or reacting to her injuries. Probably both.

He pushed ahead toward the sound of her voice, groping blindly and smashing his head and fingers several times. She continued to cry and beg for help and his frustration threatened to boil over. The crevice started to grow wider until it abruptly fed into a much wider opening and he was forced to put out his hands and inch forward in total darkness.

"Please get me out of here!" she shrieked.

"Christine, I'm here! Keep talking – I can't see anything."

"Leonard, stop!" she choked from somewhere on his left. "There's a drop off."

He froze and gingerly surveyed the ground in front of him with his foot. He shuddered and fell backward when he realized there was nothing there and he had been less than thirty centimeters away from falling off a cliff of unknown height.

"Christine, try to stay calm. Keep talking," he ordered, rolling over on his stomach.

"Get me out of here! I can't do this!" she sobbed. "Contact the ship! Please!"

He held his breath, dreading the moment when he would have to tell her that no help would be coming for the foreseeable future. He pushed himself up and crawled slowly on his hands and knees. "Tell me what's wrong, Christine. Tell me about your injuries."

"My leg. It's crushed," she gasped. "I can't see it. I don't know where my communicator went."

He crawled faster. He was worried about blood loss from a crush injury. He was worried about _her_. His left hand made contact with a coarse piece of cloth that he quickly identified as a standard issue medical bag. He sighed, grateful for just one tiny glimmer of luck in this unfathomable disaster. He fumbled with the equipment and soon located a tricorder. He illuminated the back screen, and though it didn't provide much light, given the current circumstances, it was practically a spotlight. Then the battery died.

"Oh come on!" he shouted, momentarily forgetting that he should be trying to remain calm for her sake.

He pushed forward, the sand and jagged stones on the ground digging into his hands and knees without mercy. He followed the reverberations of her breathy sobs. She sounded _so_ close, how had he not run into her already? "Christine, keep talking to me. Focus on _me_ , not on anything else."

"It hurts. It hurts and I'm afraid. I'm so afraid."

"You're braver than me," he insisted, trying to keep his voice lighthearted but failing miserably.

He suddenly made contact with her soft midsection and she shrieked. "It's just me! Oh God, Christine."

He waved his hands around in the dark, probing at the void in front of him and discovering a huge boulder with a flat face approximately where her legs should be. He ran his hands downward until he found the back of her right calf, sticky with blood but otherwise uninjured. He moved his hand over to where he guessed her left thigh was: she howled and he grimaced.

"Are you hurt anywhere else?" he asked, moving his hands over her hips and along her back and ribs to check for breaks or bleeding. She was lying facedown, which made his work more difficult.

"I can't be- I can't do- not again," she muttered, her breathing ragged.

"Yes you can," he growled, sweeping his fingers along her ribs, palpating for any fractures. "Not only _can_ you do this, you're gonna do this. I'm not giving you a choice."

"Can you stop trying to be a hero?" she squeaked. "Call for help! Get an emergency medical transport."

"Do you really think I'd be letting you sit down here like this if that was an option?" he asked.

"Oh."

Of all the things she could have said in that moment, a simple "oh" was probably the last thing he'd expected. It was so casual, like he'd just told her he'd taken the last mint or didn't like peas.

"I don't want to die alone in the dark."

"You're not going to die," he retorted quickly. "And you're not alone."

"I'm going to die…" Her words faded into whispering sobs before starting to rise back into panic.

He swallowed hard and turned his attentions back to her left leg, determined to distract her from her anxiety. "Stay with me, _dammit_. Did you have any pain killers, anti-coagulants, or sedatives left in your medkit?"

"No, I was pretty much out of everything," she groaned, trying to catch her breath. "That's why I was going back to the aid station."

"Did you have any cuff tourniquets?" he asked.

"No," she groaned.

He was glad it was dark and she couldn't see his scowl. He felt like he'd gone to sleep and woken up in the Dark Ages. It was difficult to assess how much blood she'd lost and was still losing in the dark, and though her femoral artery was intact – she'd be dead by now if it weren't – she was still oozing blood from somewhere.

He started crawling back toward the medkit to search for something to make a suitable windlass for a tourniquet as he unclasped his belt buckle pulled his nylon belt through the loops. He was just going to have to improvise.

"Is Jajin ok?" she muttered.

"I don't know," he admitted, using the laser scalpel to carve away one of the medkits metal handles.

"What about Arjia?"

"I really don't know," he insisted, trying not to think about the idea of two kids lost and possibly injured or dead alongside them in the dark.

" _Jajin_!" she called, her voice cracking. "Arjia! Can you hear me?"

"I can look for them in a minute, but listen to me," he urged, placing a hand on her lower back. "You're about to hate me, if you don't already, but I've got to get a tourniquet on that leg before you lose any more blood."

She uttered something between a cough and a whimper and sniffed, "Just do it and then go find them."

"Give me a couple of good, deep breaths," he directed her. "You ready?"

"Leonard?"

"Yeah?"

"I could never hate you."

"Huh?"

"Just a minute ago, you said I was about to hate you."

He wasn't sure what the emotion that flickered through his gut should be called, but her words had the detrimental effect of causing him to lose sight of her as a patient and see her more as the woman he had started to fall for.

"God, I'm so sorry Christine. For everything."

"Me too, now just get it over with."

He tried to wrap the belt around her leg gently, but even the slightest jostling induced agony-riddled cries. He got the belt in place, tied the loose ends around the handle of the medkit, and prepared to tighten it. There was no sense in going slow and drawing out her pain, so he twisted as fast as he could, cinching the tourniquet down on her upper thigh amidst wailing and swearing, some of it hers, some of it his.

He had just started to tie the windlass in place when she fell silent. The only sounds were his own frantic breathing and the pounding of his heart.

" _Christine_?" No response.


	12. The Way Back

Christine was confused when she woke up, not to mention in terrible pain. For a moment she wasn't sure she _had_ woken up, because she was bathed in complete darkness. No matter how hard she blinked, the lights stayed off. She was lying facedown in dirt and tried to roll over on her back, but the agony that radiated from her leg and twisted through her body knocked the wind out of her.

She exhaled a guttural gasp. The memories of how she'd ended up that way came flooding back. She'd been looking for Jajin's sister in the narrow tunnels behind the temporary orphanage when a few minor earthquakes had struck. She'd panicked, pushed her way through the tight passage, and had nearly fallen down a cliff. She'd been terrified then and she was terrified now.

" _Help_ ," she wheezed, her words barely rising above a whisper.

" _Christine_?" Oh my God, Christine?"

"Leonard?"

"I'm here," he replied.

She struggled with her patchwork memories, new and old. She continued to blink, praying for a source of light and trembling at the thought of the berserker weapon coming to finish her off.

 _No_ , that was months ago in a star system dozens of light years away. She was a in a cave on the Suliban homeworld, not hunkered down in storage locker 3 aboard the _Constellation_. She _knew_ that, but it was funny how her mind insisted on playing tricks on her.

"Christine, are you with me?"

She wondered why Leonard was there before it dawned on her that he'd ratcheted a tourniquet onto her thigh and the reason she was lying on her stomach was because a boulder had fallen during the last earthquake and crushed her leg. She felt fingers slide down her forearm and grip her right hand and another set of fingers grope at her neck. She tried to pull away, but quickly realized he was searching for a pulse.

"Where's my tricorder?" she mumbled. "How's my blood pressure and-"

"Tricorder's outta juice. Your pulse is weak and thready and I'm guessing your blood pressure is about 90 over terrible. You passed out when I put the tourniquet on you."

She took several deep breaths but her mind kept coming back to the darkness and the feeling of being pinned to the ground. She wondered why the proazium wasn't helping, and then decided it probably _was_. Without it, she probably would have chewed her own leg off to escape by now.

"Christine, can you tell me what day it is?"

"No."

She heard him sigh and immediately recognized he was checking her mental status. She was still groggy, but her thought process _seemed_ organized. Of course, she only had the one frame of reference, so maybe not.

"Do you know where you are?" he asked.

"In a smelly Suliban cave," she groaned.

He uttered a sharp laugh. "Yeah. I've been looking for a way out but I haven't found one yet."

"Why can't you just go back out the way we came?"

"Earthquake blocked the tunnel entrance. I can talk to the people on the other side, but there's nothing they can do to get us out."

"So we're trapped down here," she sighed.

" _Don't panic_ ," he growled, gripping her hand even more tightly.

She inhaled a stuttering breath and blinked. She wanted to wipe away the first signs of tears and then realized he wouldn't be able to see them in the dark. She shivered and buried her face in the crook of her left arm.

"Did you find the kids?" she asked, her voice muffled.

"Jajin managed to get out," he said. "He's ok. I still don't know about his sister."

The first tear slid down her cheek. She let it fall. "What about _Enterprise_? What about the rest of the crew?"

"Well, I'm probably owed a reprimand for ignoring orders, but if Jim wants to give me one, he can come deliver it himself."

"Huh?"

"We were given the order to evacuate because of ion storms on the surface. Then the earthquakes started. Some kid took your transporter beacon and you were going to get left behind, so I came to find you."

"I'm so sorry you got dragged into this," she whispered, hoping he couldn't tell she was on the verge of crying.

"Don't be," he grumbled. "It was my choice. Besides, there's no where else I'd rather be right now."

She snorted and tried to stifle her subsequent laughter. "I can think of a few places that would be better than this."

"Oh yeah, _where_?"

"Almost _literally_ anywhere else. Even speed dating in the Yorktown ballroom."

"Hey, I had fun at speed dating," he insisted.

She swallowed hard. She knew he was trying to take her mind off their present circumstances, and maybe that wasn't the worst idea. "Well, maybe _you_ had fun, but I never did get to meet the Vulcan anthropologist who felt like a cat trapped in man's body."

His laughter rang through the tunnel and echoed off the walls and hers soon followed. It hurt to laugh, but it hurt just to breathe.

"Speaking of speed dating, how's your right ankle feeling?" he chuckled, taking several deep breaths. "You never did come back for a follow-up."

She laughed harder. "Feels great. You did a real bang up job. Haven't thought about it in days. Can't say the same about my _left_ ankle at present, but you know." Her words trailed off; suddenly it no longer felt funny.

"Yeah," he muttered.

"Even if we get out of this, I'm going to lose my leg," she said, more to herself than Leonard.

"Listen, I don't like to toot my own horn, but I'm actually pretty good with tissue regeneration." He squeezed her hand again and gently touched her bicep.

"Yeah, I saw what you did for Dominguez's hand."

"It's going to be alright, Christine," he insisted.

"You're a liar, Leonard McCoy," she whispered.

"Listen, I know things look bad, but Jim wouldn't just leave us, he-"

"No, not that," she interrupted with a sniff. "You told me you had a terrible bedside manner."

He scoffed. "I _do_."

"Well, I think I still like you, Dr. McCoy with the terrible bedside manner." Her voice cracked and she couldn't keep the tears at any longer. "I'm so sorry for everything."

He rubbed her back and mumbled several unintelligible words.

"I don't want to die," she sobbed.

"I don't want that either."

Nearly a minute of silence passed between them. Christine shut her eyes, relishing in how delicious the sensation felt. It had been days since she'd slept. And she felt so _cold_.

"You gotta stay awake, Christine. Stay with me."

"I know," she mumbled. "I'm just resting my eyes."

"Nice try," he drawled. "So anyway, I got to thinkin' just a minute ago, and I figured maybe when we get out of here and this mission is over, we could go back to Earth and go campin' in the Rockies."

"Huh?"

"Yeah, we could go skiin', you know, _maybe_."

She noticed his accent slipped back into a strong Southern twang that was reserved for fits of drunkenness and irritation, but his voice was also light and mildly playful. She was about to ask what he was going on about before she remembered their fierce debate about the best ways to spend a vacation in the pizzeria at Yorktown. "No thanks," she said wryly. "Give me a warm afternoon on a Florida beach any day."

"And get sand in places where the sun doesn't shine?"

"We could have mai tais and watch the sun set."

"I'd drink my own piss before I drank rum."

"Depending on how long we're stuck down here, you might just have to," she muttered.

"I don't suppose you brought any sample collection cups along in your medkit?" he joked.

"Ugh, don't be _gross_ ," she sneered.

"Ok, ok, I might could try to choke down a mai tai, just for you."

"No, you'd complain the whole time. For the purposes of this fantasy, you can have a mint julep or something."

" _Now_ you're barkin' up the right tree."

She chuckled and rested her head back on her arm. "I'm so cold."

Leonard rubbed her back and grunted. "Really? 'Cause I'm sweatin' like a pig."

"Do pigs sweat?" she asked, stumbling over her words.

"You know, I don't know," he replied, tightening his grip on her hand.

"Leonard?"

"Christine?"

"I'm so tired."

"I am too but you have to stay awake. Tell me a story, any story. Just keep talking."

"You know when you asked me if I would rather have no one show up to my funeral or wedding?"

"Yeah, that was a pretty dumb question."

"Playing 'would you rather?' with chardonnay is dumb," she laughed weakly. "Anyway, I had a fiancé who dumped me five days before our wedding."

" _Jim_?"

"No, he was right after Jim. His name was Roger Korby. He was a medical archeologist. He left on an expedition and never came back."

"God, I'm sorry."

"Don't be. Roger was a good person, but if we'd have gotten married, I'd probably be miserable raising a couple of kids by myself and wondering why he couldn't just settle down."

"Did you want kids?"

Christine thought over his question. It wasn't usually the sort of thing someone asked at this stage of a relationship, but her relationship with Leonard McCoy wasn't exactly typical. Neither were their current circumstances. "I guess I like to _think_ so. Starfleet makes it hard to even meet anyone, let alone get to the point where you're contemplating reproducing with them."

"How do you think I ended up at speed dating?" Leonard asked.

Christine winced through a fit of increasingly weak giggles. She was starting to feel delirious. "You mentioned you were married before – what happened, if you don't mind me asking?"

"The usual story. Got married too young, had a kid, stayed together for the kid longer than either of us wanted to, made some mistakes, and eventually the wife found someone more emotionally sensitive to her needs. Or whatever."

"You're a _father_?" The idea of Leonard as a parent was funny on the surface but it also seemed to make so much sense.

"Yeah, I have a daughter who will be 14 in about a week. Joanna."

"You have a teenage daughter. _Wow_. Do you get to see her very much?"

"What do you think?"

"Ugh, I'm sorry, I-"

"No, _I'm_ sorry," he interrupted. "It's not like it's your fault. I see her on video chats every so often and I even made it home to Earth on leave about two years ago, but every time I see her, she's a different person. I guess I probably should have brought her up during our date."

"We agreed it was going to be a casual thing," Christine reminded him, forcing her heavy tongue to enunciate the words as best as she could.

"Yeah, you and I were never supposed to see each other again. That worked out great."

"Nothing ever seems to work out the way it's supposed to," she said, unable to keep her words from slurring together.

"Or maybe it works out _exactly_ the way it's supposed to," he retorted.

"I don't- I don't-" Her mouth stretched and tried to form some words but they just didn't want to come out right. She had no idea how she was still awake.

"You don't _what_?"

"Hmmm," she murmured.

" _Christine_?"

She entered a dark void and wondered if this was what it felt like to die. It wasn't nearly as bad as she thought it would be, and at least she wasn't alone. She wasn't alone when she woke up some time later either, but instead of lying face down in the dirt of a pitch black sulfurous cave with Leonard McCoy, she was propped up in a biobed and James Kirk occupied a chair in the corner.

It took a surprising amount of strength to open her eyes, and when she finally managed it, he stood up from his seat and made his way to her bed.

"What are you- where's- where's Leo- Dr. McCoy?" she croaked.

"I uh… stopped by to see how you were doing," he stammered. "Oh hey, uh- _nurse_!"

"Is she awake, sir?" Christine heard Maria ask.

"Yeah, she just woke up."

"Maria?" Christine muttered.

"Welcome back." Her friend's round face popped into view at the foot of the bed. Christine recoiled in shock. She could see the outline of the lower half of her body beneath a light blue blanket, but below her left knee, there was an odd, rounded stump.

"I know it's a shock: don't panic," Maria barked, pulling a medical tricorder from the wall to take some readings. "There was too much damage to save the leg, but Dr. McCoy has already programmed the tissue regenerator and we'll get you in once you're done with this course of antimicrobials."

" _Huh_? Oh, yeah," Christine replied, shaking her head, feeling the sedatives wearing off. "It's not that, it's… what happened? How long have I been out?"

"You got back in the shuttle about 16 hours ago."

"16 _hours_?"

"I'll go get Dr. McCoy and he can probably fill in the gaps better than I can. He asked to be notified the minute you woke up anyway."

"And I should get back to the bridge," the captain said. "It's good to have you back with us, Nurse Chapel."

He started to follow Maria out of the semi-private room but Christine stopped him. "Captain Kirk?"

"Yes?" He whipped around on his heel and turned to face her.

"I want to stay."

"I don't really think you have much of a choice," he said, casting a skeptical glance at the biobed. "I mean, I'm no doctor or anything, but I don't imagine you're going to be walking out of here any time soon."

"No, I mean, I was thinking about our discussion the other day."

"Oh?"

"You told me to give _Enterprise_ three months, remember? I don't need to. I want to stay."

He suppressed a grin and nodded. "That's good to hear."

Leonard appeared behind the captain in the doorway. "Nurse Chapel."

Captain Kirk shuffled backward nervously, muttering something about needing to get back to the bridge and letting her rest, and then suddenly they were alone. It had been so easy to open herself up to him in the dark when she thought she was going to die, but suddenly, things had become awkward again.

"Nurse Heikkinen already explained about your leg?" he asked, pulling a tricorder from his belt to take his own set of readings.

"Yeah," Christine replied. She studied his face, noting the dark circles under his eyes and the scratches on his forehead. "How did we get out of there?"

"They couldn't beam us out through the gallacite in the rock and couldn't transport anyone to the surface because of the ion storm. So the captain took a shuttle and an engineering team and did it the old fashioned way. Just in time too – I thought I'd lost you."

Christine rubbed her eyes. "The captain came to rescue us _himself_?"

"Jim – Captain Kirk, that is – doesn't like to do things halfway."

"He must be one hell of a friend," Christine laughed. "To come rescue you in an ion storm."

"It wasn't just me he came for. The captain's like that: loyal to a fault and protective of the crew, even when it's reckless."

Christine frowned. She'd never hesitate to agree that James Kirk was reckless, but maybe she'd been a bit harsh on him. He'd lost several ships, but maybe there was more to his bravado than she'd always suspected.

"Anyway, I'm sure you're itchin' to get out of this biobed, but you're going to be here for a while, I'm afraid," he continued. "You picked up an infection down there and we've got to clear that out before we can start tissue regeneration. It's a slow process, but you were lucky – we managed to save the knee. I see no reason why you shouldn't be up and walking again within a month."

"Dr. McCoy?"

"Yeah?"

"Thank you."

"It's my job."

"And _Leonard_?"

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

"Yeah, you just said that."

She smiled. He didn't get it, but she didn't care. She owed a huge debt of gratitude to the man in front of her, both as a doctor and as a… _whatever_ other role he was currently filling in her life. Friend? Mentor? Love interest?

"How is everything going down on the planet?" she asked.

"About the same, I suppose. Jajin is ok and they found Ajira. The ion storm passed a few hours ago and we sent another set of teams down. I'm due to go back in two hours and-"

"Have you slept?" she interrupted.

"I managed to sneak in a few hours after we got you back," he said with a shrug.

She glared at him, prompting him to clarify, "Yeah, ok, not really."

He drummed his fingers along the edge of the biobed and scowled. She watched the muscles in his hands perform the simple, rhythmic action and blushed. Those hands had touched her in so many different ways. They had excited her, saved her, and comforted her. She inched her pinky along the edge of the blanket until it touched his index finger, causing him to freeze and glance down.

The awkward détente lasted for a painful number of seconds before he cautiously slid his hand over hers and squeezed. Her stomach flip-flopped. She watched his face and when he managed to pluck up the courage to look her in the eye, she saw confusion mingled with guarded hope.

It was Christine who looked away first. Her cheeks started to burn and she bit her lip to keep from smiling as a means of diffusing the situation. She turned her hand over so their palms were facing one another and laced her fingers through his and squeezed. He squeezed right back.

Things were complicated all right, but maybe she owed it to herself to leave a little room in her life for second chances.


	13. People Will Talk

Leonard lit the candle and said a silent prayer that the fire suppression system would remain inactive. It was highly sensitive to smoke, but the candle produced so little that it seemed safe enough. He could have used an electronic one, but he was already improvising enough as it was. He turned his attention back to the place settings. They were nothing fancy, but she wasn't the kind of woman who went for that sort of thing anyway.

He jumped when the door buzzed and quickly raced to straighten the silverware. He was halfway to the door when he saw a pair of dirty socks draped over the back of the couch, so he turned, wadded them into a ball, and hid them under the couch's skirt. The door buzzed again.

He stopped, brushed his hair back, straightened his shirt, and proceeded to the door. It slid into the wall to reveal Christine. She was wearing a simple, long sleeved black shirt and a tan skirt with flat black shoes. Her straight blonde hair hung around her shoulders and she smelled like she always did, light and fresh, like clean laundry.

"Am I too early?" she asked. "I wanted to make sure I left enough room for traffic. You know how busy the turbolifts and corridors get around shift change time."

"But you live right next door," he replied, pointing to her quarters on the right.

She rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. "I know. It was a joke."

"Oh," he chuckled, mentally kicking himself for being too nervous to detect her sarcasm.

She glanced over his shoulder to the small table he'd set up. "So when you invited me over for dinner, you meant like a real dinner. Like a date?"

He rubbed the back of his neck. "It can be as much of a date or not a date as you want, I guess."

"Ok then." She stepped over the thresh hold and made her way to the table. She still moved with a slight limp that would take time and physical therapy to heal, but it was good to have her back on her feet. It had been a month to the day since the accident on Sulibaa.

She sniffed the air and said, "Something smells really good."

Before he could answer, the timer dinged in the thermal unit and he made his way to the kitchen to shut it off. "Yeah, I wasn't sure what you'd like, so I decided to stick with what I know. If pineapple chicken and rice isn't to your liking, I can always replicate something else."

"Wait – you _cooked_ this?"

"Yeah."

"You made all of this?"

He pulled the hot dish from the thermal unit and set it on a silicone pad and craned his neck to look at her. She stood at the entrance to the tiny kitchen with her mouth hanging open.

"Well, I didn't make the ingredients, those were replicated, but I put them all together, if that's what you mean. Some people might call it cheating, but there's not exactly an abundance of fresh pineapples at the edge of explored space."

"It looks and smells _wonderful_ ," she breathed. "I can't believe you went to all this trouble."

"Do you like to cook?" he asked.

"Not really. Besides, I'm not great at it. The last time I tried, I burned a pot of beans."

Leonard chuckled. "Well, dinner's served. Go sit."

He set the dish on the table between them and stared at the place setting and then snapped his fingers. "Ah, I almost forgot. Jump in. I'll be right back."

He dashed back to the kitchen and ordered drinks at the replicator. It took nearly ten seconds for each to materialize, but it was well worth the wait to see the look on Christine's face when he offered her the red and yellow beverage with the pineapple wedge on the side of the glass.

"You made me a mai tai?" she laughed. He loved the way her dark blue eyes sparkled when she laughed.

"It came from the replicator, so I make no promises about the alcoholic content."

"And you made yourself a mint julep," she chuckled, resting her elbows on the table and propping her chin in her hands.

"And just one more thing," he said, setting his drink down by his plate. "Screen, display viewing image 612-84."

The long view screen on the sidewall illuminated, displaying a picture of an azure tide washing up on a white sandy beach. The light was fading, casting beautiful hues of red and orange along the water.

"You took me to the beach," she said quietly through a pursed smile.

"I know it's not the real thing, but-"

"It's _perfect_ ," she interrupted, glancing over at him.

They tucked into their dinner and after she heaped praise on his cooking, they fell into an unusual silence. Was she unhappy? Had he gone too far? He had wanted to make the evening special, but things between them were still poorly defined. Were they dating or were they just friends, or worse yet, just colleagues?

"So it turns out pigs do sweat," she finally said, giving him a small smile. "I looked it up."

"What?"

"We were talking about it in the cave," she explained. "It turns out they actually do have sweat glands, but not enough to effectively cool themselves, which is why they wallow in water or mud."

He stared at her for a second before allowing a crooked grin to spread across his face. "Good to know."

"Ok, so maybe barnyard facts aren't the most sexy dinner date conversation," she sighed.

"So this is… a _date_?" he asked, trying to keep his tone casual.

"Or maybe it's not," she shrugged. "Maybe you do all of this for everyone you invite over to dinner."

"You're the only person I've ever invited to my quarters to dinner."

She pushed food around on her plate. "Did you _want_ it to be a date?"

What kind of question was that? He gritted his teeth and then figured he might as well throw all his cards out on the table. What did he have to lose, besides professional respect?

"I think it's pretty obvious how I feel about you," he finally admitted.

She chewed the inside of her mouth to keep from smiling but could do nothing to hide the red flush that spread across her cheeks. "People will talk, you know."

"People will talk anyway," he countered, trying to play it cool while taking a sip of his cocktail. He'd forgotten how smooth mint juleps could be.

"So I know it's a few months out, but I'm already thinking about staff evaluations," she said, casting her eyes down to her plate.

His heart sank. Just when he thought he was making progress, she did what she always did and changed the subject. If he knew Christine like he thought he did, one more word about exploring a relationship would send her scurrying back to her room.

They continued their bland and casual conversation about work while they finished their meal, and when the last bit of rice was scraped from their plates, they sat back in their chairs and stared at one another. She studied him carefully, crossed her arms, and offered a weak smile. Leonard was tired of the charade.

"Thanks for coming, Nurse Chapel."

A crestfallen look swept her face. "Thanks for having me, Dr. McCoy."

"Any time."

"So I kind of get the sense you're kicking me out."

"You can stay, if you're feelin' up to it, but I didn't have any grand plans for the rest of the night."

"I was hoping I could stay…" she murmured. "As _Christine_ … not Nurse Chapel."

He crossed his arms and gazed at her. "Dr. McCoy doesn't really care either way, but as _Leonard_ , I'd love it if you stayed."

He watched her fight back a growing smile. "Maybe we should get this all cleared up and then see where it goes?"

"I'd rather see where it goes first," he shrugged. "I can clean dishes whenever."

He could see it tore at the fastidious neat-freak that lurked within her to leave dirty dishes sitting out on a table, but she managed to fight her way through it and joined him on the small sofa. Then they dimmed the lights and talked for hours.

She told him about Jim, Roger, her mother's passing, and life aboard the _Constellation_. He told her about his Joanna, his father's untimely death, how he ruined things with his ex, and the myriad of ways Jim had nearly gotten him killed in the past decade, along with all the ways he'd come through in the end. He felt like he was seeing the real her for the first time – each incarnation had finally merged into one woman, and he loved what he saw.

At 2200 hours the lights went off automatically and he could only see her by the light of the lone candle burning on the table. He leaned forward and kissed her and though she was slow to respond, eventually the tip of her tongue traced his lips and her fingers began exploring his chest.

He was transformed into a ball of nervous energy. She pulled her blouse over her head and slid her right thigh over his lap to straddle him. His hands, usually so calm and steady, suddenly felt sluggish and oversized as he explored her soft skin. She began to unbutton his shirt but after the first three buttons, paused and looked him in the eye.

"Is this ok?" she whispered in his ear.

"Uh, yeah?" he muttered, unsure why in the hell she thought it wouldn't be.

He gently cupped the sides of her face and kissed her again, more lightly than before. She pressed herself against him. The warm heat of her soft breasts and tickle of her satin bra on his chest was delicious. She uttered a low moan and he contemplated flipping her over when the candle finally died, leaving them to explore one another in the dark.

That was until the smoke from the extinguished candle caused the fire suppression system to go off. Under most conditions when no lifesigns were present, the computer would automatically vent the oxygen from the room to extinguish the fire with minimal damage, but as he and Christine happened to be living organisms, the computer opted for a method that would kill the fire it detected without killing them. They were quickly bathed in a powder of potassium bicarbonate.

He definitely hadn't meant to hit her in the mouth with his forehead any more than she probably intended to knee him in the testicles, but even he could appreciate that sometimes those things happened when two people fumbled around blindly in the dark when a fire alarm went off unexpectedly.

"Computer, _lights_ ," he squeaked, cradling his crotch.

The lights came on and the intercom buzzed to life. " _This is Hendorff from security. System just detected fire in your quarters but I'm seeing that it's already out. Everything ok in there?_ "

Christine rolled off of him and when he managed to open his eyes, he jumped in shock. The white powder covering her body – not to mention every surface of his quarters – made her look like she'd aged about sixty years. She was cupping the lower half of her face and he could see blood trickling between her fingers.

"Oh God! _Christine_?"

" _Go_ ," she snapped, her voice muffled by her hand. "Answer him before they send a security team."

The pain in his groin was radiating up through his lower belly and the thought of getting up and walking made him want to vomit, but he stumbled over to the comm on the wall and in the calmest voice he could manage, told Hendorff that everything was sunshine and rainbows. Then sickbay called.

"This is Nurse Riley. Security alerted us to a fire in your quarters. Do you need a medical transport, doctor?"

He sighed and cursing Hendorff's efficiency under his breath, muttered, " _Bastard_."

He took a deep breath and prepared to tell her everything was all right, but he was too slow. A second later, he and Christine were swept into a matter stream and found themselves on the emergency side of sickbay with Nurse Heikkinen standing by to receive them as casualties.

What Maria Heikkinen found instead was Christine stripped of her shirt and clutching a bleeding lip, Leonard with his shirt unbuttoned and hunched over in pain from what was probably the worst blow to his testicles in his life, and both of them covered in a fine layer of chemicals designed to put out fires. Her eyes darted back and forth between them, trying to make sense of the situation.

"Are they ok?" Nurse Riley asked breathlessly, trotting into the room.

"Why did you transport us to emergency?" he seethed.

Nurse Riley's eyes widened – from panic or confusion he couldn't really say – and she responded, "I asked if you needed a medical transport and you said, 'Yes sir.'"

"I said ' _bastard_!'" he cried, stepping in front of Christine and hurriedly trying to button his shirt. "And why would I call you sir?"

"Who's a bastard?" Nurse Riley stammered, taking a step back.

" _Hendorff_!"

"Who's Hendorff?"

"I heard Dr. McCoy was injured in a fire in his quarters," Dr. M'Benga interrupted, entering the room behind Nurse Riley.

" _No_. He wasn't," Leonard snapped.

A brunette head popped over M'Benga's shoulder and declared, "I'm not on shift yet but the news is Dr. McCoy-"

"Is _fine_ ," he snapped, finishing Dr. Jarvis' sentence. "Apparently news travels faster than a jackrabbit in heat around here."

"Could everyone just give us a minute?" Christine called from behind him.

People started shuffling back to their workstations and it was hard to ignore the wild side eyes the rest of the medical staff were giving one another. Maria lingered behind but left after Christine gave her a pleading look. "I'll just leave you both to it and see about finding you a shirt," she grinned.

"Well, at least you know they care," Christine mumbled, trying to wipe some of the potassium bicarbonate off her face.

Leonard hit the privacy divider button with the meat of his fist, shuffled over to Christine, and gently lifted her chin to get a better look at her split lip.

"You should have listened to me, you know," she muttered.

"What do you mean?"

"If we had cleaned up when I wanted, we would be naked by now and I doubt your genitals would hurt as much as they probably do. Sorry about that, by the way."

"Yeah, sorry about your face," he grumbled, rubbing his hands through his hair and sending a puff of powdery chemicals outward, causing her to cough.

She uttered a hoarse laugh and said, "Nothing a few sweeps of a dermal regenerator won't fix. I'm starting to think having a relationship with you will be hazardous to my health. At the rate we're going – sprained ankle, amputated leg, fat lip – I'll be dead in six months."

"Good thing I'm a good doctor," he grinned, hoping she would think it was funny.

She shot him a stony look and he started to feel as though he'd stuck his foot in his mouth until she chuckled, leaned forward, and kissed him. She winced as her busted lip made contact with his mouth and pulled away. "That was stupid of me."

He pulled her into a hug and kissed her on the forehead, trying to ignore the salty taste of the potassium bicarbonate on her skin. "People are going to talk you know," he whispered.

"People will talk anyway," she said as the corners of her mouth turned into a small smile. "Let them talk."


End file.
